| The present study focuses on one episode of the Artistic Life program to explore the conversational characteristics of Chinese TV talk shows from the perspective of conversation analysis (CA). It is mainly a quantitative study based on the data collected from one of CCTV's talk shows Artistic Life. The theoretical framework is constructed on the basis of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's theory. The investigation concentrates on their conversational-structuring systems to apply to TV talk shows, namely, turn-taking system, adjacency pair system, repair mechanism, opening and closing system and shows their distinctive characteristics between naturally-occurring conversations and TV talk shows.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter 1 presents a general picture of the study (the current chapter), it introduces recent study of conversation analysis, study objective, research methodology and data collection of the present study.Chapter 2 reviews the related studies on media discourse. The different perspectives of the past researches of media discourse are discussed, the approaches adopted by the present research are illustrated and the differences between the past and the current study are talked about.Chapter 3 is a theoretical foundation proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's conversation analysis theory, namely, the four conversation-structuring systems—turn-taking system, adjacency pair system, repair mechanism, opening and closing system.Chapter 4 introduces the sources of data.Based on the intensive observation of the data collected so far, Chapter 5 analyzes in detail the data by comparing with ordinary conversations in terms of four conversation-structuring systems, and then it generalizes the similar and dissimilar characteristics. Chapter 6 is the concluding remark. It summarizes the major findings of this present study below:1. Turn-taking system, one of the most influential discoveries in the study of conversation, is proposed by Sacks and his associates; they notice that conversational turn-allocation proceeds in an orderly manner, and there is some system or mechanism behind them. For Artistic Life TV talk show, it is pre-allocation turn and predetermined topics owing to its particular institutional discourse, that is, the host has the right to manage the whole conversation process of the program, he gains a measure of control through the interaction of topics, the allocation of turns, the elicitation of questions which directs the conversation toward his aims.2. Pairs of utterances such as greeting-greeting and apology-acceptance are called adjacency pairs. The Artistic Life program employs question-answer format adjacency pairs. But in this TV talk show, the insertion sequence, side sequence and the repair utterances occupy a little proportion: 9.3 percent, 3.8 percent and 3.1 percent respectively of the total turns.3. In terms of the overall organization of conversation, any complete conversation is made up of an opening, a body and a closing section, and different settings and roles will generate different opening and closing. The greeting-part, guest-identification and greeting-greeting adjacency pairs are the three necessary parts of the opening section in each program of Artistic Life. The closing section in this TV talk show lacks one of the three closing sequences which form a fixed pattern in all naturally-occurring conversations― closing sequence. The host's terminating of gratitude expression instead of ritualized farewells in closing section.The present study reveals that the Artistic Life TV talk show program adheres to one local system rules observed in naturally-occurring conversations—adjacency pair system, but it diverges from naturally-occurring conversations in some aspects such as in the turn-taking system and in the opening and closing section. The study also displays the distinctive characteristics of the TV talk shows. The Artistic Life talk show's structure and function differ from ordinary conversations owing to the particular institutional settings and the respective roles and responsibilities of the host and the guest.Meanwhile, the significance of the study of Artistic Life lies in guidance for our other Chinese talk shows through the generated conversational mechanism, the application of the conversational pattern can attract a large number of audiences to concern these kinds of talk shows. At the same time, the aim of this TV talk show can provide some successful experiences for other programs; we may also make a deliberate use of the conversational structure analysis to make some comparative studies of Chinese and foreign language talk shows. |
PDF Full Text Request