An Analysis Of Characteristics And Relationships Of The Characters In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Turn-taking Mechanism

Turn-taking mechanism, as the central part of conversation analysis, was proposed by HarveySacks and his colleagues in the1970s. And since that, the researchers from home and abroad havebegun to make a research on it. The researchers abroad investigated it from the institutional talk,such as doctor-patient interaction, TV and telephone talk etc. On the contrary, based on the foreignstudies, the researchers in China mainly published a certain articles without analyzing the specificconversations. Though some researchers have made an analysis of TV talks and the sitcoms basedon the turn-taking mechanism, yet few of them have made a research on the characters’relationships and characteristics with it. Hence, this thesis will analyze the characters’ relationshipsand characteristics in the Big Bang Theory based on the turn-taking mechanism.These days, with the development of technology and Internet, the sitcoms are graduallyintegrating into our country in different ways. As we all know, the sitcom occurs in a particularsituation and owns its special linguistic features, so it is enjoying a great popularity among theteenagers. The latest sitcom, the Big Bang Theory, will be studied as the corpus in this thesis. Thisthesis will exemplify some conversations of several main characters to analyze their relationshipsand characteristics from the perspective of turn-taking mechanism, turn type&turn length and thepreference organization.Through the analysis of the selected corpus, the research finds: the turn length and the numberof turns can present the power position of the characters, and the person in the sitcom whopossesses the higher power and plays a leading role will take the longer turns and more number ofturns; the characters’ relationships and personalities can be revealed by the contents of theconversations, and can be showed by the interactive structure of dialogues in terms of turn-takingmechanism and preference organization. Based on the previous studies, this thesis attempts toreveal the relationships between the characters and their different personalities from the point ofturn-taking mechanism, through an excerpt taken from the sitcom: the Big Bang Theory.The significance of the study is to make people understand the features of mechanism of theconversation. From the perspective of pragmatics, we will analyze the turn-taking mechanism, withwhich we can study the law of using language, reveal the essence of language and above all we canfurther analyze the relationships and characteristics in the sitcom: the Big Bang Theory. Theturn-taking mechanism is intersected with sociology, psychology and so on. So the study of theturn-taking mechanism will widen its field, and more and more linguistic phenomenon will beunderstood. The practical value is that it can make readers better learn language, extend the insight of appreciation, and thus understand the essence of the sitcom.