Comparative Study Of Dispreferred Organization Strategies Used To Proffer Negative Assessments In China And USA

TV talk shows, which combine the interpersonal communication with the mass media firmly, are becoming more and more popular. In recent years, with the development of China’s media industry, TV talk shows enjoy a more innovative and more audience-interactive form and harvest good social effect. This MA thesis gains its data from CCTV-12Ye Xian which has been on the air for five years and enjoys great popularity among audience and CNN Larry King Live which is nearly the most well-known American TV talk show. In these two live interactive TV talk shows, conversations between the hosts and guests are recorded as the data, and the parts where the speaker proffers negative assessments are used as samples. After the video of the talk show is transcribed and coded with the CA transcription system, dispreferred organization strategy of conversation analysis is employed to analyze the regularity in which the hosts and guests proffer their negative assessments under Chinese or American cultural background. The dispreferred organization strategies are inter-turn gap, turn-initial delay, appreciation, token agreement, mitigation, elaboration, pre-emptive reformulation and explanation.The present study tries to find out the specific pattern of the dispreferred organization strategies used by people from different backgrounds (Chinese and American) in TV talk shows when they proffer negative assessments and the feature of the sequence structure of the conversation, then explain the findings with the pragmatic theories of politeness and intercultural communication. The two vital conclusions are as follows. Firstly, in the Chinese verbal communication, the speaker tends to employ a more gentle way of dispreferred organization strategy influenced by Chinese culture and the oriental way of thinking (mitigation typically); while in American verbal communication, people are using the strategies of elaboration and explanation which are more direct and sufficient rooted from the American spirit of pursuing reason and truth. On the other hand, nearly all the speakers, regardless of their backgrounds, prefer to employ no strategies rather than use any of the dispreferred organization strategies when it comes to the situation where instant and clear negative assessment is called for to regulate the content of the current conversation, which proves the universality and relativity of pragmatic principles of the intercultural pragmatics.The above findings aim to enrich the application of pragmatic theories and the methodology of conversation analysis in the field of intercultural communication; to be a reliable guidance for Chinese audience to better understand TV shows from home and the western countries (America as representative). More profoundly, it is hoped that the study can help us to maintain a harmonious relationship with other people with or without the same cultural background in the process of communication.