The Asymmetrical Power In Talent Show Talk-Based On The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Talent show is a popular cultural phenomenon,which has been studied from many aspects,such as the social,media aspects.Today we will study it from linguistic perspective.This thesis aims to attest a hypothesis:the power relations among the participants of talent show are distributed asymmetrically.The hypothesis is attested from three main aspects:(1) As a social activity,the participants observe a certain generic structure to achieve positive social purpose;(2) The two parties take different turn-taking methods in their conversations,which are index of power;(3) there are several societal,cultural and psychological factors which influence the formation of inequality of power.Three theories are applied in the present study.The genre theory and conversation analysis theory are used as analytical framework to study the structural features and conversational features of talent show talk.The Critical Discourse Analysis is used as the theoretical framework to explain how the institutional and societal factors influence the power relation among the speakers through language choices in talent show talk.The data in present study are transcripts of American Idol broadcast in Season Seven in 2007.The author downloads the video from the Internet and then transcribes them into text according to transcribing conventions.The transcriptions consist of 9232 English words,and they are mainly examined by qualitative and quantitative method.The study shows that there are seven functional stages which are organized as the sequence as below:(Opening) ^ Identification ^Comments~n ^Feedback~n(Advice) Result Exposure ^Closing^.The participants achieve the final goals through such a formula.The commentators control more power in the conversation than the contestants.The commentators can use three or four stages to exert power on contestants,while the contestants can only use one stage of "feedback" to express their ideas.The commentators control the turns by a lot of strategies,such as questions and interruption,and they surely are the more powerful speakers in communication.And conversely,the contestants are in a less powerful position,because they seldom have chance to initiate a conversation,ask commentators questions,interrupt and they have to keep their participation in conversation by answering questions passively.The two main causes of this phenomenon are the institutional nature of talent show conversation and its entertainment and commerce-oriented nature.