Closing The Conversation

With the development of modern mass-media culture, people nowadays have a much easier access to various movie and television productions, among which soap operas enjoy the greatest popularity and the largest audience. Soap operas which are always presenting relaxing life stories attract people with its daily setting, authenticity to real world situations and its unique comedian effects. Conversations between characters in soap operas serve as the main pattern of expression with the language characteristic of the culture in which the operas plant their roots.From the linguistic aspect, especially in the field of conversational analysis, soap opera conversations reflect the basic features of daily dialogues as well as frequently-used pragmatic approaches such as speech act strategies. Linguistic studies based on popular sitcoms which have been conducted over the past decade provide us with the evidence of feasibility.This thesis indicates that Chinese and English share the same closing strategies in conversations while differences in the frequency or specific methods of applying the strategies remain between the two languages. Utilizing the two popular soap operas in the two languages, Friends and Jia You Er Nv (literally Sons and Daughters at Home), the thesis studies over 50 conversations selected from the two operas respectively. The study has been made on the technical basis for the closing problem initiated by Schegloff and Sacks (1973) and furthered by Button (1987) and many other linguists over the past decades. Since there exist differences in the use of the closing strategies in English and Chinese, a comparison is conducted in the thesis to prove the language habits under the two cultural backgrounds.This thesis consists of six chapters, forming a systematic perspective on closing strategies in English and Chinese conversations. In Chapter 1, an introduction delivering the reason of initiating the study and some basic concepts in conversational analysis which are applicable in my study has been developed. Chapter 2 contributes to the study by providing the following analysis with a solid theoretical foundation. The closing models worked out by Schegloff and Sacks (1973), Button (1987), Laver (1975) and some other linguists have been summarized in this chapter. In Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, the respective analysis on the conversation closings of Friends and Jia You Er Nv has been conducted from the aspects of both tentative and pragmatic approaches. Additionally, the difficulties and advantages of utilizing conversations selected from sitcoms have also been carefully considered and in order to solve some related problems, selecting principles have been set for the material-collecting stage. A comparison between closing strategies in the two languages has been naturally furthered in Chapter 5, following the respective studies in the previous two chapters. The differences in conversation closings resulted from distinctions in culture and language have been discussed. Finally, Chapter 6 concluded the thesis by summarizing the study results in different parts and highlighting the significance of cross-language conversational analysis in cross-cultural communications.