Conversational Style Of American Sitcoms

It has long been admitted that language is an indispensable part of human life and that the impact of culture upon a given language is something intrinsic and indispensible. Many anthropologists, linguists and intercultural communication scholars have done much in investigating how language and culture interact upon each other, but only a few of them focus on the impact of cultural settings on conversational styles.In this thesis, to begin with, the author scrutinizes different scholars’ findings on the high-and low-context cultures and conversational style, looking into the relationship between culture and communication and putting together a list to show the distinguishing features of these two culture contexts. The author finds that they mainly differ in the following aspects:the way people communicate, degree of self-exposure, reliance on non-verbal information, attitude towards silence, interpersonal relationship and different thinking modes. The major differences of conversational styles can be summarized as:high-context culture emphasizes indirect, statues or contextual oriented, implicit and ambiguous, obedient, high-considerateness and reserved communication, however, low-context culture features direct, personal-oriented, explicit and precise, assertive and argumentative, high-involvement and self exposure communication.Next, the author focuses on the study of the conversational styles of low-context culture, American conversational styles especially. The author uses a famous American sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, analyzing several video clips, to conduct the case study which bases on Tannen’s findings on linguistic devices, i.e., the enthusiasm constraint, the machine-gun question, persistence, mutual revelation, narrative and irony.Then, by analyzing actors’ way of speaking in The Big Bang Theory and collecting necessary data, the author comes to the conclusion that (1) irony is the linguistic:device that is adopted most in The Big Bang Theory;(2) conversational styles of The Big Bang Theory can be put together as:humorous, direct, personal-oriented, explicit and precise, assertive and argumentative, high-involvement and self-exposure.Finally, the author makes clear the significance of how different conversational styles can be shaped in different cultural settings and once again stresses that the study of conversational styles can help us reinforces our intercultural awareness and avoid more conflicts in intercultural communication.