Interviewer Statement In Chinese TV Interviews: A Pragmatic Approach

This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of the interviewer statement in the setting of Chinese TV interview, with a view to exploring the major illocutionary functions of these statements and the interviewers' interpretation process towards interviewees' previous response before they make the statements.Methodologically speaking, the study is a qualitative one based on the data of 30 Chinese TV interviews associated with the economic figures and economic events. The present study, in the first place, defines the interviewer statements as those interviewer turns describing the affairs or attitudes pertinent to the individuals or groups in Chinese TV interview.On the basis of the above definition, this thesis tries to sort out the major illocutionary functions of the interviewer statements. In the light of a taxonomy standard claimed by Leech concerning the five illocutionary acts and their corresponding illocutionary functions, the interviewer statements in present study are claimed to perform the collaborative, competitive and convivial illocutionary functions.In the second place, Relevance Theory and Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) are adopted for the establishment of a relevant-accommodative model for analyzing the interviewer's interpretation towards the interviewees' previous response. This interpretation process is regarded as a crucial and indispensable step for the final formation of the interviewer statement. We proposed that though the inference process attempts to achieve the optimal relevance towards the interviewee's previous response, the interpretation itself is eventually determined, to a great extent, by the statement the interviewer is going to provide with his specific communicative intention. In addition, in order to be in conformity with the interviewee's statements, the manipulation of the interviewerstatement is considered as a linguistic behavior of speech convergence.Though we have made a preliminary study of interviewer statements in Chinese TV interview setting, more and more substantial research on this area is supposed to proceed with for an appropriate application of statements so as to achieve better communicative effect in different discourse settings.