Language Adaptation Of The Institutional Power In English TV Talk Show

Using the episodes of Late Night Show with Seth Meyers as corpus,this thesis attempts to conduct a research on how the show host and guests make different linguistic choices to adapt to the institutional power from the perspective of conversation analysis(CA hereafter).The theoretical framework of the present study consists of two theories,namely,CA and the Linguistic Adaptation Theory.Based on their study of the structures of daily conversation,Sacks,Jefferson and Schegloff put forward CA in late 1960 s.Under the framework of CA,this paper mainly focuses on two aspects: turn-taking strategies and the adjacency pairs.The other theory,Linguistic Adaptation was put forward by Verschueren in his work Understanding Pragmatics in 1999.In this book,Jef.Verschueren proposed three characteristics of language,i.e.variability,negotiability and adaptability.Verschueren defines adaptability as “the property of language which enables human beings to make negotiable linguistic choices from a variable range of possibilities in such a way as to approach points of satisfaction for communicative needs”.With regard to the relationship between the three characteristics,variability and negotiability provide premise for adaptability;without variability and negotiability,adaptability can not come into existence.The data analyzed in this thesis are collected from the episodes of Late Night with Seth Meyers.The author selects 10 shows about 300 minutes in total from more than 200 shows on the Internet.The data are examined mainly through both quantitative and qualitative approaches.The analysis is carried out from two aspects: turn-control strategies and adjacency pairs in order to find out what linguistic forms are chosen by the host and guests respectively among a wide range of possibilities.More specifically,with respect to turn-yielding,the host's adoption of nomination method takes up 52% of the total turns he has yielded,while the guest's adoption of nomination only accounts for less than 12%.In regard to turn-claiming,both the host and guests choose overlap,insertion and interruption to claim turns,but the host uses many more interruptions than guests.As for turn-holding,both the host and guest choose various methods to hold turns but guests choose these turn-holding methods more frequently than the host.As far as the adjacency pair is concerned,the author discusses it from two aspects: adjacent pairs and insertion sequence.Among the 136 adjacent pairs used by the host and the guests,the host starts 97 of them while the guests only start 39.However,in the 67 insertion sequences used by the host and the guests,the latter starts 48 and the former 19.The reason that leads to this is that the asymmetrical distribution of institutional power lies between the host and guests.The host is the controller over the show and is endowed with higher power,while guests have to act as the host demands because of their less power.The study shows that power is the crucial factor in the determination of linguistic choices in institutional conversation.The linguistic choices made by the show host and guests reflect their adaptation to their respective institutional power.The host chooses nomination,interruption and questions to adapt to his institutional power which endows him the role of being controller of the show.However,guests choose various turn-holding methods and other techniques to actively participate in the conversation by answering questions posed by the host,which shows their adaptation to the institutional power that puts them in a subordinate position of being the cooperator of the show.