A Comparative Study On Turn-taking In Chinese And American TV Talk Shows

Conversation is the most common form of communication in people’s daily life,and a turn is the basic unit and the core of conversation,turn-taking is a special language mechanism in human conversation,and it can be said that the existence of conversation is the occurrence of turn-taking.TV interview programs,also known as talk shows,are the programs based on conversation,and the process of these program is accomplished by both sides of the conversation through the way of alternating multiple turns.In recent years,such shows have sprung up on television screens and have attracted the attention of academic giants.On the basis of previous studies,this study aims to sort out the turn-taking system of TV talk show A Date with Luyu in China and The Winfrey Oprah Show in America,including turn construction,turn allocation and turn-taking strategy,focuses on whether there are similarities and differences in the use of turn-taking among people with different cultural backgrounds,with a view to answering the following three questions: first,what are similarities and differences of turn construction in A Date with Luyu and The Winfrey Oprah Show? Second,what are similarities and differences of turn allocation in A Date with Luyu and The Winfrey Oprah Show? Third,what are similarities and differences of turn-taking strategy used in A Date with Luyu and The Winfrey Oprah Show? According to these questions,the conversations between the host and guest in A Date with Luyu and The Winfrey Oprah Show are taken as the research data,and two episodes of each program will be selected randomly and transcribed into texts;Conversation analysis theory is chosen as one of the main theoretical foundations of the study,and other theories,such as Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,power relation and politeness principle,will be employed to explain the differences and similarities of turn-taking between the two programs.And the author of the thesis adopts quantitative and qualitative research methods to make a contrastive analysis of turn construction,turn allocation and turn-taking strategies of the two programs.The results are shown as follows: in terms of turn-construction,most of turns in the two TV talk shows are composed of sentences,followed by words and phrases,and the least are non-verbal actions,however,non-verbal actions can also be regarded as turn construction unit.There are more sentential structures that constitute the turn in The Winfrey Oprah Show thanin A Date with Luyu,while less words and phrases which consist of the turn in The Winfrey Oprah Show than in A Date with Luyu.In these two TV talk shows,the hosts often use "select others" to allocate the turns,while the guests use the "self-selection" method to allocate the turns.However,communicators in The Winfrey Oprah Show are more likely to assign turns by selecting others.On the contrary,the communicators in A Date with Luyu are more likely to choose the way of "self-selection" to allocate the turns.The similarities in the use of turn-taking strategy in Chinese and American TV talk shows are as follows:(1)The turn-taking strategy are used in both A Date with Luyu and The Winfrey Oprah Show,and the main sub-strategies of turn-taking are also employed in both TV talk shows;(2)The interlocutors in the two TV talk shows are more apt to employ turn-holding strategy to maintain their speaking right,and turn-yielding is the second frequent strategy they use to give the turn away,the last is turn-claiming which is the least strategy used in both shows.(3)As for the sub-strategies,while holding the turn,utterance incompletor is the most frequent strategy that participants used,the next is pause-filler and the least is incomplete marker in both shows;while yielding a turn,the interlocutors in the conversation,in particular the host,are inclined to adopt the strategy “self-selection with a limited topic” in both TV talk shows;while claiming a turn,the same situation that occurs in both TV talk shows is that the participants are most likely to use insertion to obtain the turn,and then overlapping,and the last is interruption.Non-verbal actions often appear in communication,and they are also turn-taking strategies.In this study,participants usually use some non-verbal actions to maintain or yield a turn.Differences in the use of turn-taking strategy in the two shows dwell in:(1)Speakers in Chinese TV talk show employ less turn-yielding strategy than those in American TV talk show.(2)From a sub-strategy point of view,speakers in Chinese TV talk show uses more pause-filling words than those who are in American TV talk show in terms of maintaining a turn;And when it comes to utterance incompletor,American speakers in conversation use more than Chinese speakers.In giving a turn away,Chinese speakers employ less skill of asking questions than American speakers,but they will use much more other non-verbals to yield the turn than Americans.Chinese speakers use more overlapping than American speakers in obtaining a turn,while they use lessthan American speakers in terms of the strategy of interruption.The above results give us some implications: from the perspective of turn-taking,turn construction,turn allocation and the use of turn-taking strategies can also reflect the differences between Chinese and Western cultures,which not only break the limitations of the previous studies on the differences between Chinese and Western cultures,but also contribute to the future studies of cross-cultural communication.In other words,when people with different cultural backgrounds talk to each other,they should pay attention to the hearer’s turn structure,turn allocation,and turn-taking strategies in order to avoid the interruption of conversation and misunderstanding of the communication contents.In this way,the conversation can be kept intact and smooth,avoiding the occurrence of impoliteness and so on.