A Study Of Linguistic Adaptation In Chinese Talk Show From The Perspective Of Conversation Analysis

Since the first Chinese talk show Oriental Studio appeared in 1992, the Chinese talk show has become increasingly popular and exerted significant impact on a great range of audience from every walk of life. This paper attempts to conduct a research on how the show host and the guest make different linguistic choices to adapt to the institutional power from the perspective of conversation analysis (CA hereafter).The theoretical framework of the present study consists of two theories, namely, CA and the Linguistic Adaptation Theory. As for CA theory, based on their study on the structure of daily conversation, CA was put forward by Sacks, Jefferson and Schegloff in late 1960s. The focus of their research on daily conversation is the turn-taking mechanism, which includes a wide range of issues, such as turns, turn constructional units, and turn allocations. Under the framework of CA, this paper mainly focuses on two aspects, that is, turn-control methods and the adjacency pair. In terms of turn-control methods, it can be subdivided into turn-yielding methods, turn-claiming methods and turn-holding methods. With regard to the adjacency pair, the basic idea of the adjacency pair is that turns minimally come in pairs and the second of a pair is functionally dependent on the first. Question-answer sequence is a typical example of the adjacency pair.With regard to the Theory of Linguistic Adaptation, it was put forward by Verschueren in his work Understanding Pragmatics in 1999. In this book, Jef.Verschueren has proposed three properties of language, i.e. variability, negotiability and adaptability. According to him, adaptability refers to "the property of language which enables human beings to make negotiable linguistic choices from a variable range of possibilities in such a way as to approach points of satisfaction for communicative needs". As far as the relationship between the three properties is concerned, variability and negotiability provide premise for adaptability; without variability and negotiability, adaptability can not come into existence.The data are an episode of A Date with Lu Yu broadcasted on July 28th, 2007. The author of this paper downloads the video from the Internet and then transcribes it into text. The transcription consists of 11160 characters, and it is examined mainly by qualitative approach. The aim of the data analysis is to find out what particular linguistic forms are chosen by the host and the guest respectively among a wide range of possibilities. The data analysis is mainly conducted from two aspects, namely, the turn-control strategies and the adjacency pair. Specifically, in terms of the turn-yielding, the host's choice of nomination takes 53% of the total turns she has yielded, while the guest's choice of nomination accounts for less than 12%; as for turn-claiming, the host chooses interruption 19 times and she is successful every time, while the guest attempts to interrupt the host 7 times with only three successful interruptions; as for turn-holding, though both the host and guest choose various strategies to hold the turn, the guest chooses these turn-holding strategies more frequently than the host; however, despite the guest's frequent choices of turn-holding techniques, the host still can prevent the guest from finishing his turn by interrupting the guest As far as the adjacency pair is concerned, the talk show develops with the question-answer sequence going on. The host is institutionally inscribed as a questioner, while the guest is under the obligation to provide answers.The study shows that institutional power is the deciding factor in our determination of linguistic choices. The particular linguistic choices made by the show host and the guest indicate their adaptation to institutional power. On one hand, nomination, interruption and questions are chosen by the host to adapt to her institutionally inscribed role as the controller of the talk show. On the other hand, in order to adapt to his institutionally inscribed position, the guest selects various turn-holding strategies to provide substantial information for the host's questions, and chooses infrequent and irresolute interruptions.