Power Relations In TV Talk Show Programs

As a social phenomenon, language plays a most important role in our life; and it reflects the social development and is influenced by the society at the same time. People of different social stratums vary in language use due to the differences in social status, education background, profession, gender, and nationality. Sociolinguists maintain that speech is the signal of social relationship, and among all the relationships, power relation and solidarity relation are the most common social relationships shared by all kinds of cultures.The forerunners have contributed a lot to discourse analysis, a relatively young discipline. The scholars have put forward many theories about conversation, and have done a lot of researches in concrete conversational types, such as daily conversation, TV conversation and classroom conversation. TV talk shows gain much development as the media of radio and television increasingly become rich, and gradually become popular as a special conversational type. With the employment of the methods of discourse analysis, this study explores the power relations between the show host and the show guests in TV talk show programs through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data.The thesis firstly introduces discourse analysis, power semantic and solidarity semantic and the related theories, and goes on to the brief introduction of the research of TV talk shows. The author finds that the research concerned with the power relations between the show host and the show guests is very rare. This study explores the power relations between the show host and the show guests from multi-perspectives such as, turn-taking, interruptions and overlaps, questions, male/female language and non-verbal language based on the transcription of the six selected talk shows from the program Art Life.The author concludes that as the main organizer and controller of the program, the show host has more power, and he exercises power over the show guests in many aspects; while as the story-teller and focus of the program, the show guests are passive and have certain power. At the same time, power relations are dynamic, and power is not absolutely held solely by one party. The author wishes that this study could help the communication professionals in their design of the TV talk shows.