A Tentative Analysis Of Turn Management Strategies In TV Talk Shows

Talk show is now an important part of popular culture and has great impact on common people. The Tonight, an American TV talk show, was firstly broadcast by NBC in 1954 and is now the longest currently-running entertainment program in the United States. It has great impact on other Talk shows in America and many other places in the world. Studies around talk shows, however, are relatively new and become a hot topic only in recent years. Researches by detailed conversational analysis are still limited. Little attention has been given to the study of entertaining talk shows such as The Tonight Show. Besides, while talk show as a specific programme form begins to extend its influence into China, it is study worthy to see how the Chinese talk shows assemble and differ with the American ones. This paper would like to look into the turn management features of The Tonight Show and give analysis to show the skills the host used for the success of the show. In this paper, firstly, I will review briefly the history of talk show so as to give a general picture of the talk show history and The Tonight Show. Then, I would like to go over briefly the previous studies on talk show. Theoretical framework would be built by analyzing the turn management strategies one can employ. After that, detailed analysis would be done upon the data collected.20 episodes have been transcripted and the conversations will be classified according to the turn management strategies used for further studies. The turn management strategies adopted by the host and the guest will be classified respectively. Comparison with the Oprah's show and Lu Yu You Yue will be done in their turn management features and interpretation will be given.