A Conversational Analysis Of The Conversations Between The Host And The Guests In Readers

It is a very important activity in our daily life to have different forms and contents of conversation with different people in different places for different purpose.The research on institutional conversation and daily communication arose in the 1960 s.Conversation analysis,which analyzes speech activities in specific situations,is a powerful tool to study verbal communication.This thesis takes the conversation between the host and guests in the CCTV cultural emotional program Readers(the first season)as the research material to discover the turn-taking system,adjacency pairs and repair mechanism working in the program and how the host and guests adopt turn-taking strategies to claim,hold and yield the turn during the talk.According to Conversation Analysis theory by Sacks,Schegloff and Jefferson(1974),turn-taking,adjacency pairs and repair mechanism are important components of this theory.Previous studies mainly focused on analyzing the turn-taking system,while ignoring the analysis of adjacency pairs and repair mechanism in conversation.And the research on TV talk show in China is mostly from the perspective of media studies,not much from the perspective of linguistics.Therefore,this thesis selects the interview part of Readers to investigate the dialogues between the host and guests by the approach of conversation analysis.The results show differences from previous studies and are explained according to the characteristics of this program.First of all,the turn-construction components of the host and the guests are not exactly same.The host’s turns are mostly composed of simple sentences,while the guests’ turns are mostly composed of complex sentences.This is because the host plays the role of leading the topic and asking questions,while the guests are in charge of providing detailed information and telling their experiences.As for the turn-allocation component,in order to conduct the talk in an orderly manner,the next speaker is always designated by the host rather than the self-selection of the guests.In terms of turn-taking strategies,the host adopt turn-yielding strategies most,especially nomination,to give the floor to the guests,while the guests adopt turn-holding strategies to give more details and avoid being interrupted,and the host sometimes will claim turns to explain something to the audience or supply the guest’s words in time.Among the four adjacency pairs,question-answer type happens most.In the process of conversation,when errors appear,repair mechanism will be evoked to execute correction.Most of the time,errors are self-repaired to guarantee the undergoing talk show,but there are also cases that need to be corrected by others.In sum,it can be concluded that the different institutional powers of the host and guests given by TV institution decide the current turn-taking system,with the host being active and supportive and the guests being passive and cooperative.By studying the conversation in the program Readers,this thesis aims to help the audience better appreciate the charm of the program and enrich the researches on conversation analysis of TV talk show.