A Comparative Study On Turn-taking Strategies Employed In Chinese TV Talk Show And In American TV Talk Show

Conversation is the commonly used communicative way in our daily life. Turn is the basic unit of daily conversations. The study of turn-taking is the key issue of conversational analysis. It has long been recognized that language and culture are closely connected, and are there any similarities and differences in turn-taking strategies between people with different cultural backgrounds? Setting out from this question, the current paper, based on the classic turn-taking model proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson with a corpus collected from two episodes of "Yang Lan One On One" and two episodes of Larry King Live (LKL), tries to do a comparative study on turn-taking strategies employed in both TV talk shows by adopting qualitative and quantitative methods, using the Chi-square test of SPSS to analyze the distribution of the turn-taking strategies. Through comparative analysis, the author expects that this study can answer the following questions:(1) Are there turn-taking strategies employed in both TV talk shows and how are they distributed?(2) If turn-taking strategies are adopted by both TV talk shows, are there any similarities and differences between them? Are the differences significant?(3) How to explain those similarities and differences from social, politeness principle and cultural perspectives?The research results indicate that there are some similarities and differences. The similarities include:1) Turn-taking strategies adopted by the participants in both TV talk shows are nearly the same2) In the process of yielding turns, the differences between the hosts and the guests are significant.3) In the process of holding turns, the differences between the hosts and the guests are significant4) In the process of claiming turns, the frequency of employing them by the hosts is higher than that of the guests. The differences include:1) the frequency of employing turn-claiming strategies by American host is higher than that of Chinese host.2) The differences between Chinese and American guests in using turn-holding strategies are significant. Besides, the thesis tries to give explanations from social, politeness principle and cultural perspectives.