A Comparative Study Of Turn-taking Strategies Used In Chinese TV Talk Shows And American TV Talk Shows

Conversation is the most commonly used communicative way among people in our daily life. In recent years, with the rising tide of Discourse Analysis (DA), Conversation Analysis, as a sub-branch of DA, attracts more and more researchers and many studies have been done from various perspectives. Since turn is the basic unit of conversation, turn-taking becomes as the nucleus of conversational analysis. It has long been recognized that language and culture are closely related, and then are there any similarities and differences of turn-taking strategies between people with different cultural backgrounds? Setting out from this question, the present paper, based on Sacks et al's and Richards'classification of turn-taking strategies, tries to do a comparative study of turn-taking strategies used in Chinese TV talk shows and American TV talk show by adopting the methodology of comparison. The analytical data for the present study are collected from 40 episodes of TV talk shows, with 20 episodes from Chinese TV talk show"Lu Yu You Yue"and 20 episodes from American TV talk show"The Oprah Winfrey Show". The author hopes that this study can answer the following questions: (1) Are there any some similarities and differences between turn-taking strategies used by Chinese people and by Americans through the analysis of collected language data in TV talk shows? (2) If the answer of the first question is"Yes", then what are these similarities and differences? (3) How to explain these similarities and differences from social and cultural perspectives?The research results prove that there are indeed some similarities and differences in turn-taking strategies used by the participants in"Lu Yu You Yue"and"The Oprah Winfrey Show". The similarities include: 1) turn-taking strategies used by the participants in"Lu Yu You Yue"are the some with those turn-taking strategies used by the participants in"The Oprah Winfrey Show"; 2) the participants in both"Lu Yu You Yue"and"The Oprah Winfrey Show"do not use self-selection as their strategy of yielding turns; 3) in the process of yielding turns, the hosts in both TV talk shows frequently use adjacency pair"question-answer"; 4) in the process of claiming turns, the frequency of using strategies such as overlap, interruption, and insertion by the hosts in both"Lu Yu You Yue"and"The Oprah Winfrey Show"is higher than that of the guests. And the differences lie in the following 3 aspects: 1) in"Lu Yu You Yue", the first turns are mostly started by the host, but in"The Oprah Winfrey Show", the first turns are usually started by the guests; 2) the participants in"The Oprah Winfrey Show"tend to use turn-holding strategies more frequently than the participants in"Lu Yu You Yue"; 3) 3) the strategies of overlaps, interruptions, and insertions are more frequently used in"The Oprah Winfrey Show"than in"Lu Yu You Yue"..After finding out these similarities and differences, the present paper continues to give explanations for them from social and cultural perspectives.The analytical work in the present paper is just a tiny part of Conversation Analysis, and it is hoped that further studies can be conducted to make more contributions to Conversation Analysis.