A Conversational Analysis Of Compliments In Chinese TV Talk Show

In the era of the rapid development of science and technology and the flourishing of the film and television industry,in addition to the traditional media such as books and periodicals,newspapers,radio and cable television,the emergence of TV programs based on the network expands the viewing channels of TV programs.So far,TV programs are still the main means of public information exchange and entertainment.With the increasingly high demand of the audience for TV programs,TV talk shows emerged as the times require.Because of their relaxed and natural form of communication,hot topics of current events and celebrity effects,TV talk shows are deeply favored by the majority of the audience.Therefore,TV talk shows increasingly attract the attention of the academic circles and become the focus of academic researches.The present study selects the Chinese TV talk show Round Table as the research corpus,collecting 30 episodes of it from 2019 to 2020 with about 30 hours in total.This study adopts the methodology of conversation analysis to explore the compliments in the data,focusing on the turn design of compliments,the compliment responses and the ensuing responses.In this thesis,three questions are addressed: 1)How are compliment turns designed in Chinese TV talk show? 2)How are compliments responded to by the complimentees and other coparticipants in Chinese TV talk show? 3)What are the ensuing responses provided by the complimenters following the compliment responses in Chinese TV talk show? With regard to the turn design of compliments,this study concentrates on the analysis of the forms of references to the complimentees and syntactic patterns of the compliments.It is found that the compliment givers mainly use four forms to refer to the compliment recipients,namely,person pronouns,noun phrases,no overt reference and demonstratives.Regarding to the syntactic patterns,this study finds that the complimenters mainly employ four types of syntactic patterns respectively containing nouns or noun phrases,adjectives,adverbs and verbs which carry the complimentary semantic load to give compliments.In terms of compliment responses,there are four main types of compliment responses given by the compliment recipients: disagreement,downgraded agreement,question and reassignment of the referent.Regarding to how other coparticipants respond to compliments,two main types of responses are identified,that is,upgraded agreement and same-grade agreement.Ensuing responses to compliment responses are achieved by the complimenters with escalating the prior compliment and reasserting the same compliment.In sum,this study discusses and analyzes the turn design of compliments,the compliment responses and the ensuing responses in Chinese TV talk show from the perspective of conversation analysis,trying to reveal the characteristics of compliments in the context of Chinese culture in order to provide a new perspective to explore compliments and offer some insights for the understanding of other social actions.It is expected that this study may provide useful references for people to better understand compliments in the context of Chinese culture so as to help people effectively achieve their communicative purposes,build good interpersonal relationships and construct a harmonious society.