A Study Of Interpersonal Coherence In English TV Talk Show

Under the theory of Systemic-Functional Grammar, Halliday divides metafunctions into three kinds, which are ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction. Coherence is a criterion to distinguish texts from non-texts. In Halliday and Hasan’s Cohesion in English, they propose that coherence is textual continuity and global unity as a whole. Based on this theory, we divide text coherence into ideational coherence and interpersonal coherence. With the increasing number of research on coherence, more scholars give attention to the interpersonal coherence. Guided by the study of Zhang Delu, Doctor Yang Caiying proposed the research methods of interpersonal coherence initially, which includes the interpersonal cohesive devices and register consistency. She applies the research methods to approach both legal text and news interviews. Later, other researchers used her methods for the analysis of journalistic discourse and advertisements.According to the theories of Halliday and Hasan as well as Zhang Delu, and based on the relative research methods of Yang Caiying, this paper gets the framework and applies it for TV talk shows. The author analyzes the interpersonal cohesive devices and register consistency respectively. This paper believes that interpersonal cohesive devices can be detected from not only the perspective of Mood and modality system but also appraisal words that express attitudes of introducing additional voices into the discourse. And the register consistency is mainly realized by the combination of tenor and mode. Considering the genre of TV talk shows, this thesis also conducts an analysis of intonation and body language on the basis of the framework to further embody the interpersonal coherence in TV talk shows.All corpus researched in the paper are selected from the TV talk show, Dialogue, in CCTV9, which are concerned about culture. The results of the present study show that not only mood, modality, appraisal system and intonation can reflect the interpersonal coherence in the TV talk shows, but also the tenor and mode consistency can embody the interpersonal coherence dynamically.The paper consists of six chapters. Chapter one introduces the research background, research objectives and significance of the study. Chapter two provides general literature review of TV talk shows the previous studies of interpersonal coherence abroad and at home. Chapter three lists the theoretical foundation of the thesis, including Halliday and Hasan’s theory about coherence and cohesion and illustrates the theoretical framework used in this study. Chapter four briefly describes the methodology of this thesis including research questions, research methods and data collection. Chapter five analyzes the interpersonal coherence of TV talk shows in terms of interpersonal cohesive devices and register consistency. Chapter six reaches a conclusion of the whole thesis, points out the limitation of the thesis and puts forward some implications for further study.