Analysis Of Turn-taking In American Situation Comedy The Big Bang Theory

Situation comedy, as a television program form brought from abroad, now has taken aplace in three main kinds of TV series in China. Sitcom gains great popularity in China,however, the domestic relative study on the situation comedy lags and is not all-inclusive.Most scholars pay attention to situation comedy from the aspect of pragmatics, but fewresearches learn it from language itself. Conversation analysis is an important part ofdiscourse and turn-taking is the core of conversation analysis. It has attracted manyscholars’ attention. They mainly studied turn-taking of daily conversation and laterinstitutional conversation became popular in turn-taking field. However few researcherspay attention to conversation in situation comedy. Therefore, it is necessary for us to studysituation comedy from perspective of turn-taking. This study can help to find out theturn-taking features of situation comedy, make the audience understand the languagebetter in it. It can also enrich the research of turn-taking theory. Therefore, this study hasboth theoretical significance and practical significance.Under the theoretical framework of turn-taking theory proposed by Sacks, Schegloffand Jefferson, this paper analyzes the features of turn-taking in American situation comedyThe Big Bang Theory. Conversation analysis is the main method. Qualitative analysis andquantitative analysis are combined to do the research.24episodes in season five of The BigBang Theory are studied. This thesis aims to find out features of turn-taking in The BigBang Theory, including turn-constructional components, turn allocational components andturn-taking strategies. The author firstly studies the features and distribution ofturn-constructional components. It is found that turn-constructional components are word,phrase, complex sentence, sentence and sentence group. And the main components aresentence and sentence group. And then techniques of turn allocation are analyzed from twoaspects: the current selects next and self-selection. The techniques used in this work forcurrent speaker selection are question, nomination and greeting among which question andnomination are the main techniques. And the techniques used in this work for self-selection are starting first, insertion, multiple self-selection and interruption. Startingfirst is used the most. At last, turn-taking strategies, including turn-claiming strategies,turn-holding strategies and turn-yielding strategies, are discussed. It is hope that theconsequence of this thesis will help audience have better understanding on the conversationin situation comedy，at the same time enrich the field of turn-taking theory and improve thedevelopment of social linguistics.