A Study On Speech Acts Of TV Talk Show Hosts

On a TV talk show, the speech activities which hosts conduct are all speech acts. The constitutive principle of TV talk show hosts’ speech acts and the constitutive principle of Searle’s speech acts can be corresponding. Including intentionality, preparatory conditions, sociability and facticity, and it is based on the relationship between hosts and guests, also the relevant context of interviews. From the perspective of type of hosts’ speech acts, they can be classified in different sides. Hosts’ speech acts themselves, in response to guests, the directness and the indirectness of expression, they can be the classification of hosts’ speech acts. In the classification features, assertives, questioning, approval and direct speech acts play a dominant role. From the perspective of pattern of manifestation and pragmatic function of hosts’ speech acts, hosts have different choices of sentence categories and words and expressions in different situations. Hosts should emphasize the strategies at the beginning of interviews, the whole course of questioning and the end of interviews. Including strategies of getting to the theme straight, strategies of creating atmosphere, strategy of combining open type and closed type, strategy of combining primarily questioning and secondarily questioning. Studying verbal strategies which the hosts use from different phases of interviews and discussing the process of hosts’ speech acts can not only provide a reference for hosts’ cultivation of ability of speech acts and promote the development of TV talk shows, but also has important academic value in deeply studying speech act theory of pragmatics.