| TV News interview program has now been a popular TV news interview form at home and abroad for about two decades. It falls into a special conversation genre. Mass of previous studies has analyzed different types of conversations. Conversation structure analysis (CSA), as one of the central part of conversation analysis(CA), has been successfully applied to the study of conversation structure for different conversation genres, such as naturally occurring daily conversation, classroom interaction, interview, doctor-patient conversation etc. The author of this thesis attempts to analyze a new conversation genre—TV news interview 60 Minutes from Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) by applying CSA theory by American scholars Harvey Sacks (1974), Emanuel Schegloff (1974) and Gail Jefferson (1972) to explore the distinct features of TV news interview program on the overall and local conversation structure levels.9 episodes of 60 Minutes are collected as data from the year 2008,2009 and 2010. Each episode lasts 60 minutes with the commercial breaks and contains 3 interviews covering three topics—politics, economy and entertainment respectively.57 groups of conversation are analyzed on the level of overall structure—opening and closing and of local structure—turn-taking, adjacency pairs and repair mechanism.19 groups of conversation are responsible for interpreting the overall structural features of TV news interview.38 groups of conversation account for demonstrating the local structural features. The present research reaches a conclusion that 1) on the overall structural level, the opening and closing carry the feature of three-step structure. The opening opens with headlines for capturing attention, background for disclosing information and lead-in for starting action and the closing closes with earlier efforts for alerting closing, winding-down for preparing closing and terminating for marking closing.2) On the local structural level, turn taking carries interaction-oriented feature in 60 Minutes, after a mundane quantitative analysis, it is found that:For turn-yielding patterns, nomination is the most frequently occurring patterns; for turn-claiming patterns, interruption achieves the highest frequency. In the aspect of adjacency pairs, it bears audience-targeted feature. Analysis reveals that among the 3 different kinds of questions studied:Wh- questions occupying more. The types of answer given are categorized into preferred answer and dispreferred evasion according to the media and investigative nature of 60 Minutes; Repair mechanisms is characteristic of mistake-cleared feature which are employed both by IR and IE to avoid making mistakes. However there is a clear preference for self-repair. The significance of this study is as follows:firstly, the application of conversation structure analysis theory to a new conversation genre—TV news interview 60 Minutes enriches the research contents and extends the application scope of CSA. Secondly, detailed analysis of TV news interview with 60 Minutes as a case study may help people better understand the conversation structural features of TV news interview. With TV becoming the avant-garde media, this study makes a realistic contribution to promote the audience's appreciation of news interview and motivate the development of China's TV interview program by learning from the more advanced model of TV communication in the West. What's more, this study will be pedagogically valuable for English teaching and cross-cultural communication. |
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