Conversation Analysis Of The Office Talk Among The Government Officials In The American TV Series 24

From the discourse level, every social institution has its own order of discourse. Fromthe 1970s, institutional talk has become one of the hot issues in conversation analysis researchin both China and abroad. Comparatively speaking, the domestic research on this area startedrelatively late. Besides, data selected on institutional talk both at home and abroad are mainlyconcerned with doctor-patient conversations, television interviews, courtroom discourse andso on. Research on office talk is quite few. Due to the interest in office talk, the author takes itas the object of this study.With the acceleration of globalization, we get more and more opportunities to contactwith foreign languages and culture, and watching movies and TV series is a perfect platformin learning language and culture. Conversation in them is very important resource to displaythe plot and show the conflict between characters. It is found that office talk researchchoosing conversations in movies or TV series as the data is quite few. Therefore, theAmerican TV series 24 is chosen as the data in this research, which can be an initial attemptin this field. It is analyzed in this thesis from both the conversation analysis aspect and thecharacterization aspect.Firstly, this study is operated within a framework of conversation analysis, namely, repairapparatus, adjacency pair, opening and closing system. Through the case study of office talkbetween the government officials in 24, it was designed to reveal the linguistic features andnorms of the office talk from a sideway, at the same time, to help people raise awareness andappreciation on specific types of institutional talk, thus enhance the sensitivity to use language.It tells people to select the right language and conversation models in different contexts torealize successful communication. Besides, the audience can have a better understanding andappreciation of 24 through the research findings of the office talk in this study. Secondly, turntakingmechanism in conversation analysis is taken as the theoretical guidance to analyze fivetypical conversations selected from 24, which reveals the protagonist Jack Bauer's personalityand finds out the different features of the turns when he talks with different people. Theinfluence of those features of turns in the conversations on characterization is revealed as well.And in analyzing the data, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are employed.The results show that conversations in the office talk in 24 follows some of the rules ofordinary talk. However, because it belongs to institutional talk and the data were selectedfrom a TV series, it has its own specific features. Meanwhile, it is found that turn-takingmechanism plays a very important role in characterization, which helps to interpret the TV series and reveal the relationship between characters and their personality, and providesevidence-based explanations to the performance of characters. Through the quantitativeanalysis of turn-taking mechanism in the office talk, hidden relationships between charactersare clearly revealed.