| Television programs play such an essential role in our daily life that they have caught numerous researchers'attention around the world for decades. Western linguists have extensively explored various genres of TV programs, especially news interview, with conversation analysis (CA) and the like and have produced fruitful works.Contrary to the detailed analyses in western societies, TV programs in China's context including news interview have not been investigated thoroughly. Most works on news interview are conducted from mass communication or sociology rather than CA.Another kind of popular TV programs, entertainment interview, share the importance with the news one. However, authoritative research works from CA point of view on it are much less found than those on the news interview both at home and abroad. It is partly due to the entertainment programs'diversity and flexibility, which made it difficult for academic researchers to have a universal acknowledgement either on its classification or on clear boundaries among its various subgenres. To a large extent, this leads to the confusion and obstacles for the CA researchers to implement relevant and in-depth studies. It is a more serious case for Chinese researchers.Encountered the current situation, this thesis firstly offers the definitive delimitation and classification of news interview and entertainment interview which would be examined in this study.Then, according to the standard, we prudently chose News Interview Room(《新闻会客厅》)and Jing Distance(《静距离》)as the representative of each genre after browsing so many similar TV programs and download altogether ten issues of them from the Internet in order to transcript their necessary parts for further research.After the transcription, we would analyze the collected data by applying qualitative methods under the theoretical framework of Sacks'conversation analysis. In other words, we would compare the features and characteristics of the news interview to those of the entertainment interview from the perspective of their overall organization with conversation analysis approach, including the opening system, turn-taking system and the closing system.Aiming to identify both the similarities and differences between the interactions in news interview and in entertainment interview, we propose several relevant questions to help us.Through the analyses of concrete examples and answering the relevant answers, we come to the conclusion that, with the common constraints of TV discourse and specific tasks in different institutional settings simultaneously, the interactions in news interview and in entertainment interview not only have some institutional features in common, but also display the differences in their overall organization. The further findings are as follows:1. Restricted by the institutional settings, the interactions in news interview and entertainment interview share some structural features from CA point of view and participants in them are partially confined to specialized setting to fulfill particular tasks.2. News interview in China's context is restrained by its special institutional setting more strictly than entertainment interview from the CA point of view and therefore is considered as the prototype of institutional talk.3. Entertainment interview in China's context is less confined by its institutional setting, displaying the differences form the news interview in their overall structure. However, it still has some traces of institutional talks as news interview. Hence, it is safe to say that entertainment interview is one kind of semi-institutional talk, different from news interview.With a comprehensive comparison between TV programs' two prominent genres—news interview and entertainment interview, this thesis is hoped to clarify the boundaries between various genres of TV program in China mainland from CA point of view and to evoke more researchers to work on them, so as to make further contribution to the study of the institutional talk. |
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