The Conversation Analysis Of Evasions In News Interviews And TV Talk Shows

This thesis aims at a special phenomenon --- evasion which has been studied by so many scholars from different angles. But in China, there are rare scholars study evasions under the guidance of conversation analysis. In terms of methodology, Conversation Analysis method belongs to a qualitative study based on the data-collection. All the data in the thesis are proved authentic and natural from some popular Chinese TV interviews and talk show programs "A Date with Luyu", "Dialogue" and "One on One". Concerning the traits of Conversation Analysis, there are not so many theories in this thesis. The main task of this study is analyzing the sequence organization, the structure, the regular pattern of evasions in the data. Conversation Analysis is such a research method which originated from sociology and Conversation Analysis focuses on what this language phenomenon is without many theories to explain it.Evasion as an interesting language phenomenon appeared in daily verbal communication which has been defined and categorized by different researchers. In the second part of the thesis, the related definitions and categories have been introduced. After analyzing the data collected from Chinese TV news interviews and talk show programs, we summarized that the primary classifications are direct and indirect evasions.In the Chinese data, the direct evasions are relatively simple, we analyze these data with different unit-types and finally we find out that in the indirect evasions, the interviewees usually use very short sentences and even simpler words and phrases. Direct evasions are not very commonly in Chinese verbal communication, because the Chinese culture and the oriental way of thinking affected us even when we refuse others, we should do it very politely. Comparing with the direct evasions, the indirect evasions are the point of our study not only because they are more complicated but also more commonly used by Chinese evaders. Single turn and multi-turn indirect evasions often applied by Chinese evaders. And we also analyze the data with sequence organization and preference/dispreference organization. A lot of research angles of Conversation Analysis can be applied for analyzing the data of Chinese evasions. Evasions appeared when the participants of communication violate the rule of adjacency pairs. So the abnormal pattern of evasions draws our interest, question-evasion pattern has many different types: question-irrelevant answer, question-jokes etc.Through analyzing the evasion data from Chinese TV interviews and talk show programs, the study tries to find out the specific pattern of this interesting and common language phenomenon with Conversation Analysis method. It is hoped that the research can guide us maintain harmonious relationship with other people.