A Contrastive Study Of Conversations In Chinese And American Tv Talk Show

The term "Discourse Analysis" was first used by Z.S. Harris in his paper entitled Discourse Analysis which was published in the magazine Language in 1952. Discourse Analysis refers to the linguistic analysis of naturally occurring connected spoken or written discourse. The analysis of written discourse is called text analysis and the analysis of spoken discourse is called conversational analysis. In the past 150 years, the research has been done mostly on daily conversation at home and abroad and has achieved fruitful results. But there is a lot of research room in TV talk show for us to explore. TV talk show, as a kind of institutional dialogue, is the conversation that happens under special backgrounds, on special occasions and making analysis of this kind of discourse is also the trend of discourse analysis. The present research is based on conversational analysis theory proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson and borrows Li YueE's research results, that is, her complement and perfection to Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's theory. The study selects the most representative TV talk show in China and America:《艺术人生》in China and Larry King Live in America. The two TV talk shows are made a contrastive study from a pragmatic perspective and a lexical perspective and the pragmatic perspective is illustrated from four aspects:repair mechanism, adjacency pair, iteration and interruption. The aim of the thesis is to explore the characteristics and rules of the conversation, to find the similarities and differences in TV talk show and to make the communication smooth between western people and eastern people.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part is an introduction. It mainly introduces the concepts of discourse, conversation, the purpose and significance of the research, research method, data collection and the framework of this thesis. The second part is a literature review. It introduces the background of conversational analysis and its definition, development and the previous relevant studies by means of this theory. The present study is based on the theory of conversational analysis proposed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson and Li YueE's complement and perfection to this theory. The third part is the main body of this thesis. From a pragmatic perspective and lexical perspective, Chinese data and English data are analyzed. The pragmatic perspective includes repair mechanism, adjacency pair, iteration and interruption. Through analyses, the results show there are differences and similarities in Chinese and American TV talk show. The fourth part analyzes the reasons behind these similarities and differences, including different values, ways of thinking and social relations. The last part is the conclusion. The researcher makes a summary of the results and limitations and possible trends of future study.