A Discourse Analysis Of Semi-institutional Conflict Talk In Chinese TV Talk Shows

The television talk show, taking an old form of communication:conversation, and transforming it into a low cost but highly popular form of information and entertainment through the practices and technologies of television, appealed to TV producers and audience soon after being introduced into China. The 1990s saw the great success of Cui Yongyuan's Tell it as it is. Almost at the same time, the majority of audience in China came to understand and like talk show. Ever since then, talk shows have been launched on almost every channel in China. Today the far-reaching social impact of talk shows demands and deserves a careful research on them.Now that talk show, as a kind of media discourse, bears some similarities with both daily conversation and institutional discourse, it is regarded as a combination of interpersonal communication and media transmission. Ilie (1999,2001) has noticed this and developed her findings into a relatively complete theoretic system, where she "proposed that one of the major distinguishing features of talk shows is their semi-institutional nature, i.e. they exhibit a mixture of characteristics pertaining to both casual conversation (non-institutional) and institutional discourse (institutional) in terms of discursive configuration and goal, participant role assignment and role switching, talk and topic control." In addition, conflict talk-a speech activity in which either of the talking parties defends his own positions and from time to time, intentionally or unintentionally, strays from the expectation held by his counterpart for aspects of the ongoing discourse (what role, what to say, how to continue the topic...)-is inevitably found in everyday conversations; the situation is even more prominent in talk shows:besides all the factors that may give rise to conflict in everyday conversations, the institution feature, and the cooperation on the part of the host and the guest for entertaining audience should be included. For example, the host, owing to the program arrangement, dispatches one question for the next without paying any attention to the guest's reaction; or the guest notices offences, or the host and the guest make fun of each other in the disguise of argumentation.There is a possibility to investigate talk show's conflict talk phenomena combined with its semi-institutional nature in the method of discourse analysis. Therefore, one episode from each of four popular Chinese talk shows has been selected for analysis. They are Face to Face (interviewer being Wang Zhi, interviewee being Li Lianjie, broadcast on May 12th,2007), Yang Lan One on One (interviewer being Yang Lan, interviewee being Zhao Wei, broadcast on Nov.11th,2005), A Date with Luyu (interviewer being Chen Luyu, interviewee being Li Lianjie, broadcast on Dec.19th,2008) and Yong Le Hui (interviewer being Li Yong, interviewee being Zhao Wei, broadcast on Nov.19th,2009).With a focus on the topic of semi-institutional conflict talk, several tasks will be accomplished in this paper,1) representing the semi-institutional nature in talk shows by contrasting and illustrating institutional and non-institutional traits; 2) classifying and describing semi-institutional conflict talk based on its two foundations:institutional and non-institutional conflict talk; 3) analyzing the ways in which semi-institutional conflict talk functions to construct the program features in each show.Altogether, the dissertation consists of seven chapters:The first chapter introduces the background, aims and significance of this study.Chapter Two is a literature review with two subjects:one is about the research on conflict talk, from different angles; the other is about media studies and linguistic studies of talk shows.Chapter Three focuses on the discursive nature of talk shows, i.e. the semi-institutionalness, where institutional and non-institutional features, which mix in talk show to represent the semi-institutional nature, will be put into contrast.Chapter Four is an introduction of my analytic method, including the preparations of video data and the transcription before my analysis.Chapter Five is the chapter where conflict talk is investigated within the framework of semi-institutionalness - a) participant's role and interactional model are used to distinguish institutional from non-institutional conflict talk; b) the management of institutional conflict talk is explored; c) a classification is done of non-institutional conflict talk.Chapter Six is an examination of the four Chinese talk shows on how semi-institutional conflict talk contributes to constructing the traits of each talk show.Chapter Seven offers a summary of this paper.