An Analysis Of Meet The Press From The Perspective Of Turn-taking

Based on the theories of the conversational analysis proposed by Sacks et al, the thesis chooses the editions of the English program Meet the Press from August7th,2011to September the25th,2011, and analyzes the transcriptions adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods, aiming to find whether the rules of turns in this program abide by the conversational analysis and to discover the features of turn-taking strategies used by the interviewer and the interviewees.The results show that the model in the TV news interview conforms to the turn-taking model proposed by Sacks et al. Most of the turns of both the interviewer and interviewees are constituted by sentences. As for turn-taking strategies, the interviewer employs the strategies of turn-yielding the most, while, the interviewees employ the strategies of turn-holding the most. It’s decided by the asymmetrical power between the interviewer and the interviewees in the institutional talk, with the interviewer being active and superior and the interviewees passive and inferior.The thesis studies the practices of the turn-taking strategies adopted by the interviewer of the English TV news interview Meet the Press which has gained much popularity in the U.S.. So it can serve as-references for the Chinese interviewers to improve their abilities of turn-taking, which is helpful to improve the quality of Chinese TV news interviews.