An Analysis Of Conversational Turns In Political Television Interview From Socio-cognitive Approach To Pragmatics

Language is an essential tool for our life,so utterance becomes the basic part of human language communication system.And turn-taking is an important part of daily conversation;it has its own regularity.Now more and more researchers begin to study it,they find that turn-taking in different genres(general conversation,semi-institutional discourses,and institutional discourses)has different features.As we know,political interview is a special TV program which involves many sensitive political issues.And such political interview program has high audience rating for that reason.So in such program,how interviewees choose words to answer questions or state his/her views to gain the support of the public is important,how interviewers ask questions and encourage interviewees to answer so that to get more information is also important.This thesis applies the Socio-cognitive Approach to Pragmatics(SCA)to analyze the features of turn-taking in political TV interview.SCA,which has become a new trend in the field of pragmatics,combines both societal factors and cognitive factors to analyze the phenomenon of daily conversation.The purpose of this thesis is to find out the turn-taking features of political TV interview based on SCA.According to this purpose,this thesis puts forward three research questions:(1)What are the features of turn-allocation in political TV interview based onSCA?(2)What are the features of turn-construction in political TV interview based onSCA?(3)What are the features of turn-taking strategies used by the interlocutors basedon SCA?This thesis uses quantitative method and qualitative method to analyze 5transcripts in CNN's interviews.Through analysis,we find that when interlocutors construct their turns,first they will be cooperative;then they will consider the public and the profit of him/her using the relevant information and salient experience to achieve his/her intentions.And most interviewees will use sentence group to answer questions or state their views in order to make their views more explicit,but interviewers will use simple sentences to construct turns(usually questions)so that to economize time.When they allocate turns,they can obey the turn-taking rules,but interviewer will interrupt the turn if necessary.Interviewers usually yield the turn using the questions,claim the turn through interruption,but interviewees usually hold the turn in order to state his/her views more clearly.