| Based on the study on structures of daily conversation, the School of Conversation Analysis was established by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson in late 1960s, and the significant contribution made by these three pioneers was the putting forward of turn-taking organization which includes turn construction, turn allocation and turn-taking rules. Realizing that the institution settings are the most common situations for social activities and orders, conversation analysts gradually turn their study emphasis to conversations occurred in certain types of institutions.As a special mass media discourse with rapid development in last two decades, TV news interview, a typical institutional conversation, gets hold of extensive attentions from conversational analysts naturally. It is a TV interview program of face-to-face conversation focusing on social hot issues. Its distinct characteristics in terms of the four components, the setting and the Q&A format provide it with special turn-taking organization and further result in the certain choices made by participants on strategies for turn-controlling. Accordingly, conversation analysts have made efforts to study TV news interview from various aspects. However, it is regrettable that no systematic research, overseas and domestic, focuses on turn-controlling strategies in TV news interview.In order to make up for the shortage in this field, the present thesis collected 20 English TV news interviews from"Dialogue"program on CCTV-9 from January to June 2009 totally about 600 minutes long, then transcribed them into text mode, and examined them by qualitative method to find out the turn-controlling strategies adopted in TV news interview, in aspects of turn-yielding, turn-claiming and turn-holding. Specifically, as for turn-yielding strategies, the interlocutors mainly adopt three major types of verbal strategy including nomination, adjacency pair and sum-up expression, and some nonverbal strategies such as gesture indicating"you please", relaxation of hand or body tension, non-level tone and decreased volume. In terms of turn-claiming, the two major verbal strategies are interruption and starting the next turn with no interval, and the former one is subdivided into five types according to interrupter's intention. Nonverbal strategies contain gazing with urgency, clearing one's throat, sitting straightly and taking a deep inhale, but they can just operate as assistant ones. As far as turn-holding, verbal strategies including discourse marker, space-making, repetition and hesitation filler, and nonverbal strategies such as avoiding direct eye contact, decreasing evident intervals, using up-level tone, lifting the voices and quickening speaking speed all can be made use of to hold a long turn.In addition, by using quantitative method, this thesis also made a comparison between interviewers and interviewees in their choices made on these strategies, and some evident differences are found out. As for turn-yielding strategies, interviewers mainly adopt nominations, adjacency pairs and all three types of nonverbal strategies, while interviewees mostly adopt verbal strategy of sum-up expressions and never use gestures at all. In terms of turn-claiming, interviewers make use of all five types of interruptions with high frequency and success ratio, while interviewees turn to just three types with low frequency and success ratio. As far as turn-holding, the numbers of each type adopted by interviewees all exceed those adopted by interviewers, but the difference is not so great.Lastly, the author analyzed the main reason for above differences from the perspective of Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory. It is found that owing to different positions or roles held by interlocutors in TV news interview, the interviewer has superior power to control the whole conversation progress, while the interviewees can not but submit according to their inferior power. This asymmetry of institutional power plays as the main reason which finally leads to the difference in strategy choices between interviewers and interviewees. |
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