A Comparative Study Of Engagement Resources Between Chinese And English TV Interviews

TV interviews have become one of the most popular TV programs worldwide. ForeignTV interviews are relatively mature after half a century’s development, while Chinese TVinterviews are relatively young. Since the first TV interview appeared in China in1993, theelement of conversation has involved in all kinds of news, politics, social education,entertainment, and sport programs. Although, the design of Chinese TV interviews that isshaped by the form and experience of foreign TV interviews shares some commoncharacteristics with them due to the tendency of globalization, they can’t achieve greatsuccess as foreign TV interviews do. Till now, scholars both at home and abroad have done alot of studies in this respect. However, few of them study the language used by TV interviewhosts from the perspective of Appraisal Theory especially the perspective of Engagementresources. This thesis tries to make a comparative study of the language used by Chinese andEnglish TV interview hosts by means of Engagement resources.The author of this study chose15transcriptions of Chinese and English TV interviewsrespectively. Under the framework of Engagement system, the author conducted bothqualitative and quantitative methods with the help of Systemic Coder which aims atsummarizing the distribution of each kind of Engagement resources in the two corpora as wellas the similarities and differences between them. And the author will try to find the reasonsfor the difference.The comparative study finds that both similarities and differences exist in the usage ofEngagement in the language used by Chinese and English TV interview hosts. Similaritiesmainly include:1. Both Chinese and English TV interview hosts tend to use more Contractvalues;2. In Contract type, Disclaim values have the most frequent occurrences. WithinDisclaim sub-type, the two target texts have similar frequencies in Deny values;3. Endorsesub-type in Proclaim sub-type is used little in the language of both Chinese and English hosts;4. In Expand type, the preferred values are Acknowledge and Modality in both corpora.Especially Modality values have the same frequencies in both target texts. Due to differentsocial structure, cultural value, and philosophy of life of the two countries, differences are found as well:1. In Expand type, great differences are found on the frequency ofAcknowledge;2. In Contract type, the attention is paid to Counter values. Although Countervalues take up a small proposition, there are indeed significances between the two values.This thesis gives a comparative study of the Engagement resources in the language usedby both Chinese and English TV interview hosts from the perspective of AT with a view tobringing new light to other genres and contributing to the application of AT, thereforeproviding pedagogical implications to TV interview.