A Comparative Study Of Metadiscourse In English TV Interviews

Metadiscourse is widely used in the analysis of current discourse to investigate language use. Metadiscourse is expression devices used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the author/speaker to construct coherent discourse, combine discourse and context, indicate the author/speaker’stance, attitude, sensitivity to the audience and imply the relations with the information. Television interview is a form of television program in which a conversation is carried out between two or more people, usually between a television host and a famous person, to share information and arouse sympathy or admiration in the audience. Therefore, there are rich resources for the study of interpersonal communication in television interview. This study based on Hyland’s metadiscourse theory investigates the metadiscourse devices to realize interactional meanings in English TV interview focusing on the interviewees.This study consists of both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. It is based on two corpora of 10 English TV interviews each from Yang Lan Interview hosted by Yang Lan and Top Interview hosted by Shui Junyi. According to the field the interviewees are from, the materials are set into two corpora, namely the political corpus and the business corpus. All raw materials collected are inputted into the Microsoft word and then are transformed into text format. The study is conducted within the UAM Corpus Tool and all metadiscourse items are figured out and set into the ten metadiscourse subcategories manually. In order to ensure the reliability of the analysis, the metadiscourse item identification was carefully checked for three times. Since the interviews are not in exactly the same length, the occurrence frequency of metadiscourse items was calculated under a common basis of 1000-word approach (elements per 1000 words) to ensure the comparability.This study mainly focuses on two questions:(1) What are the features of metadiscourse distribution in the political corpus and the business corpus respectively? (2) What are the similarities and differences in metadiscourse use between the political corpus and the business corpus?According to the analysis, there are several findings. Firstly, there is a high level of metadiscourse use in both corpora. And there are far more interactional resources than interactive resources in both corpora. Secondly, there are many similarities of metadiscourse distribution between the two corpora. The distribution of the metadiscourse is quite similar. They both use more interactional resources than interactive resources. Among them, transitions get the largest proportions in interactive resources in these two corpora. Self-mentions make up most of the metadiscourse. Self-mentions in each corpus make up about one third of the metadiscourse. Hedges, boosters, attitude marker and engagement markers are almost equal with each other. And the engagement markers take a little more proportion than the other three markers. Frame markers, endophoric markers, evidentials and code glosses present the least proportions. Thirdly, there are some differences between these two corpora. The political interviewees tend to use more hedges, attitude markers and engagement markers than their business counterparts. Fourthly, the reasons for the similarities may be the model of English TV interview program and the functions of every metadiscourse subcategory. Every single interview discourse is composed by several segments, which are responses to various questions proposed by the interviewer. Thus, the discourse segments are relatively short and the topics change frequently. And another reason may be that every metadiscourse subcategory has its own special functions; therefore, some may have more chances to be used and the others are just the opposite. Fifthly, the reasons for differences may be the different identities of the interviewees, namely politicians and businessmen. On the one hand, the political interviewees may be much more cautious in choosing words and more cautious with the media. On the other hand, to the political interviewees, the interviewers tend to ask more high-sensitivity questions related to political issues and eager to dig out their views on the issues. But for the business interviewees, the interviewers’ questions are mainly focused on their companies, their ways to success and experiences, which have lower sensitivity.This study may be of some help in promoting the acknowledgement to metadiscourse and may be of certain value to the journalists and help the English learners to know more about English speech.