| TV talk show, as a kind of television genre, is a subtype of media discourse designed to fulfill the double communicative purposes of information exchange and entertainment via the television. As they spring up in such a variety, TV talk shows have become a highly popular form of communication and aroused the attention of many researchers in the linguistic field. Although linguistic studies on talk shows have been carried out from various perspectives, few researchers have so far approached them, particularly Chinese talk shows, by drawing on appraisal theory. MR. ZHOU LIVE SHOW, a recent popular Chinese talk show, is hosted by the stand-up comedian Zhou Libo and presented, as it often is, in the form of his monologue. One prominent feature of this program lies in that appraisal resources are massively drawn upon for the effectiveness of his program and creativity of his language style. In spite of its popularity, few researches have been carried out from a linguistic perspective. Appraisal theory is concerned with the language of evaluation, attitude and emotion, and with a set of resources which explicitly position a text's proposals and propositions interpersonally (White,2001). This research attempts to analyze the appraisal resources in MR. ZHOU LIVE SHOW from the perspective of appraisal theory so as to reveal how these resources characterize the speaker's evaluative style.The research purpose mentioned above is formulated with a set of specific research questions as follows:1. What are the frequencies of various appraisal resources in MR. ZHOU LIVE SHOW and what is the evaluative style of Zhou Libo?2. What are the features of the realization of appraisal resources in MR. ZHOU LIVE SHOW?3. What is the style of graduation of appraisal resources in MR. ZHOU LIVE SHOW?The data for analysis are collected from 11 episodes of the program which are selected at random, with each episode lasting about 40 minutes. The total number of characters in the collected data is 86428. The researcher watched these episodes repeatedly on the CDs and at the same time carefully transcribed each of them in words in written forms. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted in this research. Quantitative analysis is employed to figure out the frequencies of appraisal resources and qualitative analysis is used to explore how these resources reveal the speaker's evaluative style.Based on the approaches above, we have come to the following conclusions:On the whole, the speaker' s evaluative style is characterized by news commentary, irony, humor, amusement and exaggeration. Moreover, he always intends to disclose some social problems and human beings'flaws and keeps a high profile.Specifically speaking, the speaker's style of evaluation can be illustrated from the two aspects below:(1) Appraisal resources are frequently employed by the speaker, with their number of occurrences amounting to 6252 times. This result is associated with two factors. On the one hand, the speaker adopts the style of news commentary to give his performance. On the other hand, as a professional comedian, his performance always produces a comic effect. (2) The realization of various appraisal resources shows that the speaker's style of evaluation tends to demonstrate the characteristics below. First of all. the speaker is inclined to reveal some current social problems and human beings' flaws like avarice, hypocrisy and ignorance, to arouse the attention and provoke the thought of the audience and to resonate with them. What's more, it is also characterized by irony, humor and amusement. In addition, the speaker always keeps a high profile and presents the style of exaggeration in his selection of resources for the effectiveness of his talk show. |
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