An Analysis Of The Context Of TV Talk Shows From The Perspective Of Conversational Analysis

TV talk show is a semi-institutional conversation,originated in America and it is called “Talk Show” abroad.The development of TV talk show at home is relatively lagging.Since the debut of the programme Tell It Like It Is hosted by Cui Yongyuan,TV talk shows have gradually become popular in China.So far the relevant studies at home mainly focus on non-linguistic areas,such as journalism study,television broadcasting science and so forth.The studies from the perspective of linguistics are less than the studies of non-linguistics and the discussion of TV talk shows from the perspective of conversational analysis is even less.Conversational analysis was born in 1960 s,jointly proposed by Sacks,Schegloff and Jefferson based on daily conversations.This theory consists of three parts,namely overall organization,adjacency pairs and turn-taking.Turn-taking is the key part of the theory,which includes four aspects,the definition of turn,turn constructional unit,turn-allocation components and rules governing turn-taking systematics respectively.This thesis selects fifteen episodes of Yang Lan One On One as research materials and adopts literature research method,content analysis method and case study to explore the context embodied in Yang Lan One On One.This thesis is comprised of three chapters.Chapter one makes a literature review of the relevant studies on TV talk shows at home and abroad and the relevant studies on Yang Lan One On One.Chapter two leads in context and conversational analysis,the theoretical foundation of the research and the theory consists of three parts,namely overall organization,adjacency pairs and turn-taking.Chapter three dedicates to the conversational analysis of the context embodied in Yang Lan One On One.Besides,the grasp of context by the hostess is also a key part in this chapter.The main conclusions of this thesis are as follows.Firstly,overall speaking,the form of TV talk shows is relatively fixed,especially in the opening section and closing section.The opening section of TV talk shows mainly focuses on mutual greetings between the host and guest while farewells of both parties mainly appear in the closing section of the programme.Secondly,it is obvious that the hostess has the initiative and controls the whole conversation while the guest is in passive status during the conversation,which reflects the difference of the institutional identities of both parties.Furthermore,the application of control strategies of turn-taking contributes to context construction,thus ensuring smooth conversations.The last but not the least,analysis and discussion shows that the hostess Yang Lan adopted four ways to construct the context embodied in conversations of the programme,namely attaching great importance to cultural context,grasping the context of co-text,applying humor to the conversation appropriately and making full use of the external objects,thus ensuring the success of the whole conversation.To sum up,conversational analysis is of instructive significance to the analysis of context embodied in TV talk shows.Besides,the author hopes that the paper could provide a new perspective for researches of TV talk shows in the future and some insights for the hosts of TV talk shows of the same kind.