A Comparative Study Of Turn-taking Strategies In Tv Talk Shows Between Mainland And Taiwan

For the past few years, the study tide of Discourse Analysis(DA) has kept upsurging. As a sub-branch of DA, Conversation Analysis(CA), has also attracted more and more researchers’ interest. As a result, studies on this issue have been carried out from a variety of perspectives. Since a turn is the basic unit in conversation, turn-taking has naturally become the nucleus part of CA.Nowadays, as a language program, TV talk shows have become one of the hottest kind of TV programmes, in which the guests invited are usually the most popular and well-known celebrities recently. This kind of programme plays an important role in entertaining the audience and reflects the era information. TV talk shows can provide plenty of corpora for CA researches, for they contain a large number of conversations.This thesis aims to do a comparative study of the turn-taking strategies adopted by programmes between mainland and Taiwan with the corpora selected from “Super Interview” and “Kang & Xi”. The mainland TV talk show “Super Interview” is hosted by the hostess, Li Jing and the host, Dai Jun. And as for “Kang & Xi”, the name of it is made up of one each word of the two hosts’ names, which are Cai Kangyong and Xu Xidi, who is more usually called Xiao S. Since both the programmes have two hosts, one host and one hostess, and their programme style is the same, these two are of great representativeness and comparability.The methodologies adopted in the research are theory interpretation, observation description and case analysis. The analytical data for the study in this thesis are collected from 40 groups of conversations in these two TV talk shows, with 20 examples from Mainland TV talk show “Super Interview” and 20 examples from Taiwan TV talk show “Kang & Xi”. On the basis of turn-taking strategies theory, the thesis intends to examine the following issues:(1) Whether there exist some similarities and differences in turn-taking strategies adopted by mainland TV talk shows and by Taiwan ones or not.(2) Given the answer is positive, then which aspects these similarities and differences lie in?(3) What are the possible reasons for the similarities and differences.The results turn out that there indeed exist some similarities and differences in turn-taking strategies adopted by the participants in the TV talk shows of mainland and Taiwan. The similarities include:(1) turn-taking strategies adopted by the participants in mainland TV talk shows and those adopted by the participants in Taiwan TV talk shows are the same;(2) The frequency of the three strategies adopted respectively by both shows from the highest to the lowest are successively turn-holding strategies, turn yielding strategies and turn-claiming strategies;(3) Turn-claiming strategies and turn-yielding strategies are more frequently adopted by the hosts in both shows, while turn-holding strategies are more adopted by the guests, which illustrates that the hosts in both shows are in the status of controlling the turn in general and the guests are relatively given more chance to express;(4) The hosts always tend to adopt “question-answer” of adjacency pairs to yield a turn, while the guests tend to use utterance incompletors to keep a turn. And the difference lies in:(1) The participants in TV talk shows of Taiwan tend more frequently to adopt turn-claiming strategies compared to the ones in mainland. In the process of claiming a turn, the frequency of using strategies such as interruption, and insertion by the participants no matter the hosts or the guests in Taiwan is higher than the ones in mainland. Besides, as to claim a turn, the mainland hosts tend to adopt insertion while the Taiwan hosts tend to adopt interruption. That is to say, the mainland hosts are more moderate and try to claim a turn by a more polite and inductive way while the Taiwan hosts tend to claim a turn in a more direct and casual way and pay less attention on the coherence of the early and post language.(2) Interruption and insertion, which are frequently adopted as strategies to claim a turn by the participants in Taiwan, are not only used for controlling the topic direction and supplementing information, but also used as a way to make jokes, animate atmosphere and entertain the audience. In other words, Taiwan TV talk shows are of more entertaining effect.(3) The frequency of adopting turn-holding strategies by mainland shows is higher than that in Taiwan. Besides, the occupancy rates of holding turns by the guests in mainland is higher, too. That is to say, compared with the Taiwan TV talk shows, mainland ones give the guests relatively more right to keep the floor.(4) In almost the same long time of the show, the turns in Taiwan TV talk shows are more than those in mainland ones, besides, the duration of a turn in mainland TV talk shows is longer than that in Taiwan ones. That is to say, the language in mainland TV talk shows is relatively lengthy but more logical, while the language in Taiwan ones is more brief and concise but relatively less logical.(5) In almost the same long time of the show, since the total amounts of turns in Taiwan TV talk shows are much larger. It means that the frequency of turn-taking in Taiwan TV talk shows is higher than that in mainland ones. That is to say, Taiwan TV talk shows’ interactivity is better and its programme effect is more lively.(6) In Taiwan TV talk shows, both the hosts and the guests enjoy more freedom to claim, yield or hold a turn, which proves that the degree of participation by both the hosts and guests in Taiwan TV talk shows are relatively higher.The research is of great value to better analyze the regular patterns of the TV talk shows and contribute to instruct other talk shows by providing reference for their hosts. Hopefully, the hosts can get guidance from the research in organizing their terms in a more resourceful way to control the turn-taking of the show more skillfully without diverging the current topic and feedback in time. The research can also help the audience to understand and enjoy the show more. Besides, it is likely that even the ordinary beings’ speaking skills could be advanced in daily conversation by referring to the study.