A Conversation Analysis Of Leaders:Rui Chenggang’s Show

News interview, as an important mode of TV programmes, has become an indispensable means of information transmission. English news interview with figures from different cultural backgrounds expands Chinese audience’s horizons with an introduction to intercultural ideas. With the booming of such programmes, researchers have been paying more and more attention to research on them. Research concern sociology and semantics have been covered thoroughly, while that in pragmatics is still on the way.In order to explore the rules in news interviews and provide some references for such programmes, this thesis is intended to analyze the conversations in the news interview Leaders:Rui Chenggang’s Show with conversation analysis theories of Sacks et al. Previous achievements in this field at home and abroad are reviewed, after which the theoretical framework is established accordingly.The subjects are conversations in Leaders. Seven episodes concerning economics and business are collected randomly from the programme and are transcribed to a15000-word corpus for analysis. Qualitative research and quantitative research will be combined to guarantee the accuracy and credibility of this thesis.The data analysis is divided into three parts:turn-taking system, adjacency pair and opening and closing system. In the first place, turn-taking system is further divided into turn-constitutional unit and turn-allocational unit. Characteristics of turn-taking in the interviews are investigated to see if they are in accordance with the rules. Turn-constitutional unit includes word, phrase, clause and sentence. Turn-allocational unit is further divided into three aspects:current speaker selects the next speaker; next speaker self-selects; if there’s neither selection nor self-selection, current speaker may continue. Then different types of adjacency pair are classified and discussed to find out the patterns in them. And preference organization is explored from the aspects of preferred organization and dispreferred organization. The strategies of dispreferred organization are generalized for analysis. The last but not the least, opening and closing system in the interviews are studied to see its comparison and contrast with mundane conversations.In the very end, conclusions are arrived as a summary for the whole thesis. The characteristics show that the conversational elements in Leaders such as turn, adjacency pair, opening and closing, are designed for the purpose of information-obtaining. Questions are pre-allocated for getting the information from interviewees. Thus, Q-A structure domains the conversations and motivates the interaction to move forward. These are typical in news interviews.