A Comparative Study Of TV Talk Show In Mainland And Taiwan From The Perspective Of Discourse Analysis And Other Features

Discourse analysis also called text analysis. It is one method to do the research of language. It sees language unit that longer than sentence as the object of study to observe the language that been used actual in people’s life, in order to explore the organization character and usage character of language. Meanwhile, to explain the constraints of language from the aspect of communicative function and people’s cognitive characteristics. As an important point of view, discourse analysis focuses on linguistic unit that longer than sentence and explains the process of verbal communication with the help of context, socio-cultural background and people’s thinking. Discourse analysis pays close attention to written language such as fiction, journalism, legal text and commercial correspondence, etc. It also contains spoken language such as telephone conversation, classroom interaction, political oration and TV interview, etc.TV talk show has become one of the hottest kind of TV programs recently. The guests in the programs are usually popular celebrities at present. This kind of program plays an important role in entertainment and reflects the information of the era. It is also uncommon for audience to see the other side of the celebrities. On the basis of the linguistic data of famous mainland TV talk show "Super Interview"and Taiwan TV talk show "Kang Xi", this paper intends to make a comparative study on the hosts’ discourse of two programs."Super Interview", hosted by several TV entertainment programs’hostess Li Jing and famous host Dai Jun, is a TV talk show entertainment program which mainly interview stars. Each program presents one or two stars to tell their stories behind success. The name of "Kang Xi" was from the names of hosts Kangyong Cai and hostess Xidi Hsu(xiao S). This fashionable entertainment program not only invite stars from the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, it also presents Taiwan politician sometimes. There are both a host and a hostess in these two programs, and they would invite the same guest at similar period of time."Super Interview" and "Kang Xi" are highly comparable for the reason that they both take topic interview, the same measure to interview the guests.This paper intends to make a comparative study on the discourse phenomenon of the hosts in "Kang Xi" and "Super Interview" from the aspects of topic selection, ways of topic development, turn control, host’s style, etc. By making a comparison of the discourse differences between "Kang Xi" and "Super Interview", this paper attempts to find out the law and model of language use of the hosts in these two talk shows.The language data of this paper are several videos down load from the internet that have been broadcast. We take some videos that invited the same guests in similar period of time, and analyze the materials from the aspect of language and pragmatics to find out the difference between the programs in mainland and Taiwan. The significance is to improve the hosts’ facilitation skills and language skills, even the art of the conversation of ordinary people. The whole paper is consist of six parts.Chapter One is the introduction. This paper expounds the part subjecting to cause, the research significance, language data source and research methods.Chapter Two is the generality, it mainly focus on the survey of former research on TV talk show at home and aboard. Make a review of research on discourse analysis abroad and classify the discourse analysis of TV talk show in China.Chapter Three discusses the difference of the hosts and guests selecting topics between the two programs through the comparison of guests’ linguistic data of these two programs. This chapter mainly analyze the hosts’ preference selection of topics and how do the hosts and the guests get the topics changed separately, and give some examples to illustrate how they continue the topics.Chapter Four mainly about the reasons for the hosts and the guests hold the turn by comparing the linguistic data of several programs. Make a comparative study of different reasons that the host and guest intervene the turns in different programs. At last draw some tables to compare the occupations for the turns of the hosts and the guests respectively.Chapter Five is about the language styles of the hosts. This paper makes a comparison in detail for the hosts in two programs.Chapter Six is the concluding remarks.