A Conversation Analysis Of Yang Lan One On One

The theory of Conversation Analysis is proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson basedtheir researches on daily conversation in the1960s.Turn-taking operation, adjacency pair andoverall organization are the threeessential components of Conversation Analysis, among themturn-taking operation is the core one which includes turn construction, turn allocation andturn-taking system.19English episodes of Yang Lan One on Oneare selectedin this paper todiscuss theoverall organization which includes the opening and closing parts and sessionorganization which includes turn-taking strategies used in conversation by host and guests inguidance of Conversation Analysis. The episodes collected are also divided into three studygroups according to the guest’s occupation, namely political, business and entertainment group;and comparisons of statistics of different strategies applied by the host toward these threegroups are made. The reasons for these differences are explained from the perspective ofcommunicative competence.After careful observation and recording,combined with relevant theories of ConversationAnalysis, it is found that the macro-construction of YangLanOne OnOne can fall into three parts,opening, body and closing. The opening of Yang Lan One OnOnecan be divided into three steps,opening monologue by host, video clip and official beginning of the conversation, the closingcan also be three steps, namely pre-closing sequence, closing sequence and closing monologueby host.While in the body part, turn control strategies used by both host and guests are analyzed indetail in terms of turn yielding strategies which include nomination, adjacency pair and usingsum-up expressions and sentence structure, turn taking strategies involve interruption, take theturn with no intervals and turn holding strategies, including utterance incompletor, imcompletionmarker and hesitation filler. After thorough analysis, it is observed that the host and guests areentitled uneven power because of the specialty of talk show, the host uses the nomination, firstpart of adjacency pair and the guests use sum-up when giving turns; the host uses interruptionand taking the turn with no interval when taking turns; while since the guests are alwaysnominated to take the floor, they use seldom strategy of taking the turn with no interval; and bothguests and host employ all of the turn-holding strategies to avoidbeing interrupted, however, thefrequency used by host are much less than the one used by guests.All of the verbal strategies by host, namely nomination, first part of adjacency pair andinterruption are further counted andanalyzed and it turns out that firstly, the frequency of calling the guests by their title or occupation when interviewing political group is obviously higher thanthose when interviewing business and entertainment group, secondly, when using the first part ofadjacency pair to give up floor, the frequency of using declarative sentence in business andentertainment group is much higher than the one used in political group; thirdly，the frequency ofthe interruption for commenting when interviewing political group is clearly smaller than theones drawn from business and entertainment group.All of these findings support the previous theory proposed by Hymes. The host tends toselect the congruent codes towards the guests from different social backgroundsto fit the settingand topics. The reasons are that the topics discussed with political group guests are relativelysensitive and the figures come to the show are all international famous people, while the topicsdiscussed with guests from business and entertainment filed are generally life stuffs and worklife, therefore the host selects congruent codes to create relax and easy conversation atmosphere.