Turn-holding Strategies In Chinese Talk Show Conversations

This paper is a pragmatic analysis of turn-holding strategies adopted by the guests in the semi-institutional interview talk 'Tell it like it is' in CCTV. This study is devoted to answering the following three questions: What turn-holding strategies do Chinese employ in this program? How do they apply different turn-holding strategies to adapt to powers? What are the major differences in the use of turn-holding strategies among people endowed with different powers? Methodologically speaking, this research is a qualitative one.The theoretic framework of this study is based on Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory (2000), which is regarded as a framework of communication from a pragmatic perspective. Under this theory, the choices on turn-holding strategies are also identified as one kind of linguistic choice. According to Verschueren, making linguistic choice is a process of negotiation and adaptation, during which a lot of factors have to be taken into consideration. In this study, we put emphasis on the social factor—power, which is regarded as a core factor in interpersonal relationships. And the invited guests will be classified in terms of three kinds of power: leader power, expert power and those without power. Then the whole analysis centers around these three types of people.After a detailed analysis of the 146 collected tokens of turn-holding, it is found that there are mainly five categories of floor-holding strategies used in the Chinese context of TV talk show 'Tell it like it is': interruption, space-making, monologue, pre-sequence and discourse marker. Through further investigation, we come to find the choice on a definite turn-holding strategy is a process of adaptation to social world, to be more specific, the speaker's social status. It is mainly the element of power that exerts a vital impact on the selection of floor-keeping devices. The reason why different people differ in the use of strategies to keep their turns lies in the fact that they have to adapt to their own power.