A Pragmatic Study Of Meaning Construction In Interview Programs

In the last decades, along with the rapid development and growing popularity of the mass media, TV interview discourses have received more and more attention by linguistics and scholars. Though some researchers have studied interview discourses from the perspective of pragmatics, such as conversational implicature, turn taking and presupposition,few scholars study the interview discourse from the perspective of meaning generation. This research explores the meaning construction of interlocutions in TV interviews by applying several pragmatics theories.This thesis adopts the theories such as presupposition, Grice’s the Cooperative Principle(CP), Leech’s the Politeness Principle(PP) and speech act theory to study the interlocutors’ pragmatic meaning. Pragmatic presupposition, which is dependent on context, is a quite common phenomenon in daily conversations, news reports, advertisements and literature works, TV interviews are unexceptional as well. This research focuses on analyzing the interviewer and the interviewee’s interlocutions from two perspectives, one is the pragmatic presupposition and speech act in the interviewer’s utterances, the other is flouting or observing the CP and the PP in the interviewee’s utterances. It is worth noting that the interviewee observes the CP in most part of the interview to achieve the interview goals of providing wanted information and building positive public image. The inferences drawn from the analysis are as follows:(1) most of the interviewer’s questions contain true or false presuppositions as well as illocutionary force, most of which are request;(2) in most cases,the interviewee recognizes the interviewer’s presuppositions. They deal with some question traps by using some rhetoric devices such as rhetorical question, paraphrase, and express certain communicative intentions in this way;(3) in some occasions, the interviewees adopt the Politeness strategy and flout the Cooperative Principle to convey particular pragmaticmeaning. Finally, conversational strategies are also analyzed, to help communicators applying them, and to better interpret speaker’s utterance meaning and communicative intention.This thesis contains five chapters. Chapter one introduces the research background,objective, methodology and data collection as well as outline of the thesis. Chapter two gives a thorough review of the previous researches on TV interview and meaning respectively,including the definition and features of TV interview and five kinds of meaning such as sentence meaning, utterance meaning, textual meaning and discursive meaning. Chapter three contains the theoretical frameworks used in the present study. The theories of presupposition,the Cooperative Principle, the Politeness Principle and speech act theory are reviewed.Chapter four analyzes the discourses of TV interviews and investigate the mechanisms of the interviewers and the interviewees’ meaning construction and and the pragmatic strategies by adopting the theories of presupposition, the CP and the PP. Chapter five summarizes this research’s major findings, significance and limitations, as well as suggestions for further study..This thesis studies a specific genre i.e. interview discourse from the pragmatic perspective, and analyzes the interlocutors’ pragmatic meaning construction as well as the communicative strategies. It is hoped that this research can help people better interpret and comprehend the interlocutors’ utterances in interviews, and help people construct potential meaning in order to achieve the expression and communication of deeper meaning in their daily conversational communications.