A Case Study On Turn-taking Strategies Used By Chinese And Western Guests With Dialogue As An Example

Language plays an important role of communicative tool by which different ideas and intentions are expressed. With the development of linguistics, conversations as well as how conversations transmit information have been gradually becoming the research focus and as the basic unit of conversation, turn has attracted more and more attention home and abroad, too. Scholars have made various studies on it and have obtained some achievements. However, these studies are not sufficient for their own limitations. Nowadays, globalization brings more and more chances of the cross-cultural communications. In order to make communications more fluent and harmonious, it is necessary to understand the differences between the turn-taking strategies of Chinese and Westerners, which is seldom touched in the previous studies, however. Therefore, this thesis is aimed at finding the different use of turn-taking strategies between Chinese and western guests in TV English interview program.This thesis is made under the theoretical framework of turn-taking system proposed by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson in 1974. Based on the research of daily conversations, Sacks et al put forward the turn-taking system in which includes turn-construction units, turn-allocation component and turn-taking strategies. Turn-taking strategies are further classified into turn-yielding strategies, turn-claiming strategies and turn-holding strategies. And then these three aspects also include various concrete strategies.In order to find the difference between the application of turn-taking strategies by Chinese and Western guests, the English interview program Dialogue broadcast on CCTV-9 is chosen as the object of the study. Yang Rui, the host of this program, has edited two books Highlights of Dialogue volume one and volume two. These two books contain twenty episodes of Dialogue about different topics with both English and Chinese versions which spare a lot of trivial work for the author of this thesis. Some episodes are also downloaded from CCTV internet and then are transcribed into text for the sake of analysis. At last ten episodes are selected which contain 749 turns in all. The turn numbers of hosts, Chinese guests and Western guests respectively are 362,166 and 221.Through analysis, it is found that the turn length of Chinese guests is averagely shorter than that of Westerners. Concerning the turn-yielding strategies, there is a comparatively small difference between Chinese and Westerners. They are both inclined to adopt complete self-selection strategy. About the turn-claiming strategies, thinking of the impoliteness of interruption, both Chinese and Western guests seldom employ this strategy. And Western guests use overlap more frequently than Chinese do. Talking of the turn-holding strategies, although Chinese and Westerners both use hesitation fillers and discourse markers in most circumstances, Chinese guests adopt space-making more frequently. After these differences have been found, the reasons behind them are explored as well.