A Study Of TV Talk Shows In China From Relevance-Adaptation Model

With the expanding development of technology, many of the TV talk showprogram appear unexpectedly as a new talent in daily life. The key to the success of theprogram is the dynamic verbal communication. Therefore, the host should act as a goodguider.Relevance-Adaptation Model is proposed from the perspective of speaker, and theauthor improves the model on this basis. The success of the communication depends ontheir joint efforts and both of them have the obligation and responsibility. This papertalks about the applications of the new model for the TV program from the perspectivesof the generative process and interpretative procedure. To Grice’s four maxims, Sperberregards that there is no need to care about the cooperation principle, while the authordoes not agree with him. According to the analysis of the transcripts, the author findsthat the cooperation from the guest is the key to the success of their communication. Asa result, only the participants of the talk should obey the “question-cooperation-answer”turn-taking mechanism, the communication can be successful. However, there is thesituation of noncooperation sometimes. This thesis discusses three situations: the firstone, the ostensive information is not very relevant, so the guest doesn’t know what tosay or gives irrelevant answers; the second one, the information is relevant, while theguest refuses to answer, so they have to change to another topic; the third one, theinformation is relevant, the guest keeps off the subject or avoids making a clear anddirect response.Based on the Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber and Wilson and the Theoryof Linguistic Adaptation by Jef Verschueren, this thesis integrates these twocomparatively influential theories of pragmatics and associates them withRelevance-Adaptation Model newly proposed by scholars in China which is acomparatively comprehensive communicative model. It makes a tentative study of the new model of verbal communication from the perspective of discourse generation andcomprehension so as to provide a new research perspective for pragmatic study.