An Analysis Of Interactional Metadiscourse Use In The Oprah Winfrey Show

As a combination of information and mass media, talk show is a kind of interaction present to the audience through the television. Among various kinds of talk show programs, The Oprah Winfrey Show is highly influential in American. This study pays attention to the discourse analysis of the The Oprah Winfrey Show based on Hyland’s(2005a) model of interaction. As an effective device for listeners’ intruding and interaction construction between the speakers and listeners, interactional metadiscourse plays an important role in the talk show discourses which are usually used to express the speakers’ view and build interaction with the listeners.According to Hyland(2005a), the model of interaction consists of two dimensions: stance and engagement features. The two dimensions are divided separately into hedges, boosters, attitude markers, self-mentions and reader pronouns, personal asides, shared knowledge, directives, questions. This thesis aims to conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the use of interactional metadiscourse in 15 episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show.The findings show that interactional metadiscourse are widely used in the discourses of The Oprah Winfrey Show. The raw occurrences of stance metadiscourse are much higher than those of the engagement features. Among all the subcategories, self-mentions, reader pronouns and questions appear to be the most frequently used while shared knowledge appears to be the least. Specifically speaking, within the dimension of stance, self-mentions rank the highest followed by attitude markers, hedges and boosters while within the engagement dimension, the frequencies of reader pronouns appear the most with questions, directives and shared knowledge follow behind.This study will expand the scope of discourse analysis to the workplace discourse, i.e. the talk show discourse. In addition, the analysis of interactional metadiscourse could help to promote the English learners’ reading, writing skills and provide references for the talk show workers.