| Utterance is the basic part of human language communication system. With the constant deepening of language research,linguists have begun to pay attention to the utterances in different contexts. Conversation Analysis (CA) is a method for studying naturally occurring conversations. It is first introduced by U.S. sociologist H.Sacks, Schegloff, G.Jefferson, etc. who used inductive method to explore the principles of social interaction in daily conversation through a large number of real analysis of the recording materials. They believe that there should be a system existing in daily conversation. That is turn-taking system. It has been applied to a variety of contexts (classroom, courtroom, TV media discourse etc.)TV news interview is a new type of conversation. Previously, many researches on it have been done from the perspective of Sociology, Media Communication, Psychology, Linguistics, etc, but there is little in-depth linguistic study on two-party TV news interview by using turn-taking system. This thesis tries to supply this gap.The data analyzed in this research cover 10 news interviews from CCTV's program Top Talk. Based on the research method of conversation analysis, turn-taking system is adopted to analyze how the system works in the interview. This paper attempts to answer the following two research questions:1. Whether the turn-taking system fits the two-party interview program Top Talk. If not, which ones should be revised?2. What kinds of turn-taking strategies do the interviewer (IR) and the interviewee (IE) use to claim and yield turns? How do IR and IE use these different strategies to manage the whole program?The research shows that this system basically applies to the setting of TV news interviews but differentiates in the aspects of turn construction component and turn allocation component. In the interview, a turn can be constituted not only by words, phrases, sentences but also by verbal backchannel items. Compared to the interviewee, mostly the interviewer prefers to use the turn constituted by verbal backchannel item to show agreements or make comments on the interviewee's utterances. Both the interviewer and the interviewee's turn are more composed by the group of complex sentences. Turn allocation component means that if IR selects IE to speak, IE will take the turn; If IR does not select IE to speak, IR will continue the present topic. If IE self-selects to allocate the turn, then IR will get the turn by leading a new topic; If IE does not self-select, then IR will continue by repeating the topic; IR gets the turn to continue the topic by which all the interviews will go smoothly following this model through which IR and IE keep exchanging the speaking chance so that the interview is able to continue.In the setting of the news interview, the interviewer is the controller of the program and the interviewee is the focus of program. For turn-taking strategies, both the interviewer and the interviewee would like to use interruption, overlap, insertion or nomination to claim or yield turns. In the turn-claiming, insertion is used with highest frequency. It is a moderate way to show the different opinions. Interruption is a little impolite, therefore it is used less frequently and mainly used by IR to control the program; IE uses it because of the wrong prediction of transition relevance place (TRP) or being eager to put forward his opinions before IR has finished his questions or statements or when he finds a problem in IR's expression. Overlap appears with the least frequency and it happens mostly because of the wrong prediction of possible transition place in the current speaker's utterance. Once overlap appears, the disorder will happen in the interview. In the turn-yielding, the interviewer yields his turn more often through nomination while the interviewee more through self-selection which indicates relatively less power than nomination. In the interview, IR uses self-selection for only 91 times, which is much less than nomination. This shows IR's highly control over the development of the interview. As to IE, he uses self-selection for 436 times which shows that they are in a comparatively powerless status in turn allocation.The present study may have implications for the study of turn-taking and help to gain deeper insights into the nature of interactions in TV news interviews. It is also hoped that the investigation into the turn-taking operation in TV news interviews may benefit the chief editors, especially the host and the guests in similar programs. |
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