Conversation Analysis Of Chinese And American TV Talk Shows

In our daily communication,conversation is the most common way to communicate with others.Based on the theory of Conversation Analysis put forward by Sacks,Schegloff and Jefferson and further developed by Liu Hong,this thesis aims to find out the differences of the "opening and closing" and"turn-taking strategies" between Chinese TV talk show A Date with Luyu and American TV talk show Ellen Show,helping people get a better grasp on conversation skills and improve their verbal communication ability.Among the previous studies on TV talk shows under the theory of Conversation Analysis,most of them are about the conversation structure and the ways to realize a turn and there are few studies about the differences between Chinese and American talk shows.The thesis,from this point,discusses the differences of the "opening and closing" and "turn-taking strategies"between two programs with the method of qualitative analysis and contrast.The research corpus for this study is collected from five interviews in A Date with Luyu and five interviews in Ellen Show.Through analysis,the differences of"opening and closing" include:at the beginning part,the opening patterns in A Date with Luyu are mostly the same,while in Ellen Show they are usually varied.Luyu often provides abundant background information to introduce the guests,while Ellen introduces the guests more briefly;in the closing part,Ellen interrupts the guests directly to limit time in many cases,which is never seen in A Date with Luyu.The differences of turn-taking strategies lie in the following aspects:the frequency of turn-taking in Ellen Show is higher than that in A Date with Luyu;the participants in Ellen Show tend to use turn-holding strategies more frequently than the participants in A Date with Luyu;the use of turn-claiming strategies by the participants in Ellen Show is more often than that in A Date with Luyu;the host in Ellen Show uses more turn-yielding,turn-holding and turn-claiming strategies than the host in A Date with Luyu.Besides,explanations for these differences are made from the perspective of culture.