A Cross-Cultural Analysis Of Chinese And American Initiation Strategies And Coping Strategies Of Sensitive Topics In Celebrity Interviews

As an ingenious genre of media discourse, celebrity interview involves notonly regular talks but also more sensitive topics closely related to the celebrities.However, many former scholars have delved into this subject only from theperspectives of linguistics and mass communications, overlooking or downplaying therole of cultural factors in the interviews. This provides the impetus for the currentstudy.Based on conversation analysis, politeness principles, face-negotiation theory,cultural value dimensions and the theory of culture context as the theoreticalframework, this study will probe into Chinese and American TV hosts’ initiationstrategies and guests’ coping strategies of sensitive topics from the perspectives of bothpragmatics and cross-cultural communication, with an attempt to uncover Chinese andAmerican cultural differences revealed in TV interviews. Besides, in order to answerthe three research questions, this study employs qualitative approach to analyze thetranscribed materials of celebrity interviews and quantitative method to contrastivelydescribe the collected data.The major findings of the research are presented as follows. First, the sensitivetopics are much more frequently initiated in the American celebrity interviews than inChinese celebrity interviews. Besides, different from American hosts’ and guests’straightforward manner, the Chinese hosts and guests are keen on adoptingcircumlocutory strategies. Then the researcher unveils the cultural factors underlyingthe research findings.In a nutshell, this study is of both theoretical and practical significance. On onehand, the findings of the study are conducive to improving Chinese and Americanpeople’s cross-cultural communication competence. On the other hand, this study isalso expected to shed light on future TV program designing and production and on TVpresenters’ future interviewing techniques.