A Study Of The Interruption On Talk Shows

According to the Turn-taking Rules proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, in an ideal conversation, only after the current speaker finishes the current turn will the other one begin to speak, and turn-taking appears on the transition relevance place(TRP).In fact, interruption is a common phenomenon in conversation. It was not until the 1970s that the existence of interruption received attention from people. The socialists, Zimmerman & West were among the first researchers to investigate interruption systematically, they mainly investigated the relationship between gender and interruption. Researchers in China did not investigate interruption as early as the researchers abroad. The Chinese researchers investigated interruption at about the early twenty-first century. They not only investigated interruption in daily conversation but also investigated interruption in institution discourse, for instance, the interruption in courtroom, the interruption in English classroom and so on. Although the interruption in talk show program is involved, its investigation is not thorough, because of which, this thesis investigates interruption in the talk show program.Selecting the famous program Dialogue as its focus, this thesis analyzes the interruption in the talk show program. According to the features of the talk show program, it makes classifications of interruption, deals with the functions of interruption and analyzes the distribution of the classifications and that of the functions of the interruption in televised program quantitatively The thesis uses the Cooperative Principle and the Turn-taking Rule to analyze the causes of interruption in televised program, and it also discusses the influences of interruption on the talk show program. Through analyzing the interruption in the talk show program, it aims to help the readers to have a better understanding of interruption, and meanwhile, it guides the participators of the talk show to grasp the suitable chance to interrupt and makes the program progress smoothly. It also can help the reader to have a better understanding of the conversation structure and to know the applications of the Cooperative Principles and the Turn-taking rules.