An Analysis Of The Discourse Strategies In Public-debate TV Talk Show "Venus&Mars"

With the rapid development of China’s TV media, public-debate TV talkshow---a new form of television talk show began to attract the public’s attention.Although the number of such type of programs is still little, the public-debate TV talkshow has aroused people’s great interests.“Venus&Mars” is a new public-debate TVtalk show aired on Star TV since2012. As the newest example of this kind of talkshow,“Venus&Mars” is well received by the public.“Venus&Mars” is a creativecombination of monologue talk and public-debate talk. This thesis only focuses on thedebate part where the host Venus (Jinxing) first elicits a controversial topic happeningthat week, then invites two sides of guests, usually the person involved and somespecialists to have a discussion and debate about the topic. The core of this programlies in the verb “collide”. In the sharp collision process of all kinds of thoughts andopinions, this talk show hosted by Venus directly hits the living situation of Chinesepeople, showing the contemporary Chinese way of thinking.Based on a qualitative analysis, this thesis tends to find out how differentparticipants with different roles employ different strategies to reach their goals, on thebasis of the principle of goal-direction and cooperative principle.The first chapter of this thesis is a brief introduction about the researchbackground, research questions, aims and significance of the study and also theorganization of the thesis. Chapter Two reviews previous studies about both thepublic-debate TV talk show and discourse strategies. Then in Chapter Three, thetheoretical framework of this study is presented which contains the cooperativeprinciple and the principle of goal-direction. Chapter Four introduces the procedure ofdata collection, data transcription and data analysis process. Chapter Five, whichcontains the most important contents of this thesis, firstly analyzes the goal relationsin public-debate TV talk show. And Then based on the data, the discourse strategiesused by the host in terms of questioning and feedback and those used by the guests interms of attacking and defending are described and analyzed in details. It is found thatthe host makes use of different kinds of questions as questioning strategy to fulfilldifferent goals. And the frequently used feedbacks by the host of this program includevocalizations, concrete words, sentence completion, repetition and questions.Strategies used by the guests are:(1) direct negation, grasping the faults of theopponents, rhetorical questions and opening a critique with a compliment in terms of attacking strategies;(2) shifting the topic, providing over-information, making use ofauthority effect and intentional distortion in terms of defending strategies.The last chapter firstly summarizes the major findings of this study, then pointsout the limitations of the present study, followed by suggestions for future researchdirections.In conclusion, this study shows that discourse strategies used by the host and theguests in public-debate TV talk show are highly motivated and influenced by theirgoals in interactions. As to the significance of the study, On one hand, as the studiesfocusing on discourse strategies in public-debate TV talk show are very few, thisstudy hopes to contribute to the literature concerning this part. On the other hand, thisstudy is expected to be beneficial to the talk show chief editors, sponsors, andespecially the host and guests to achieve success in the program. Besides, a study ondiscourse strategies can also help people to improve their self-expression and abilityto respond in communication.