Analysis Of Discourse Strategies Of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is the most classical talk show interview program in America.Its discourse of the humorous host and wise guests has been favored by the audience,and the various discourse strategies which can show the typical style of American talk show program catch the attention of the language learners and linguistic researchers.This thesis aims at the analysis of the discourse strategies of the host and the interviewees of the program.Sack’s Discourse Strategies Analysis Theories and Grice’s Cooperative Principle are used to be the theoretical foundation to analyze the features of discourse strategies in the talk show interview program.This thesis takes both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the selected interviews to find out the strategies applied in the program.The interviews contain 12 entertaining interviews and 12 political interviews,which were broadcast during Christmas of 2014.Meanwhile,analysis between the different groups of interviewees is made to find out if there are any differences between their discourse strategies as well as the cultural factors related to the differences.The research shows that the discourse strategies of this program include nomination strategy,self-selection strategy,utterance-incompletor strategy,incompletion marker strategy,repetition strategy,mouth-hesitation filler strategy,interruption strategy and insertion strategy.What’s more,there are some differences in discourse strategies between the entertaining interviews and political interviews of this program.In entertaining interviews,the host uses interruption strategy to end the discourse.In political interviews,the host uses insertion strategy to end the discourse.The entertaining guests and political guests use the same discourse strategies but the specific words and their frequency are different.That is because the Cooperative Principle is demonstrated differently among people of the different fields.The host cooperates with different guests well in spite of the differences.The Study of the Discourse Strategies in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon not only could help people improve their language level and better appreciate talk show program and American culture,but also may provide some linguistic help to those language learners.