A Study Of Self-repair In The Oprah Winfrey Show From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Self-repair is a kind of repair which is an unavoidable and a common linguistic phenomenon in our daily conversations.Although there are many previous studies on self-repair,most of them pay attention to basic theoretical studies on structures and forms of self-repair.Few of these studies refer to the issues of self-repair in application.In view of this,the thesis attempts to research the characteristics and functions of self-repair in application from the perspective of relevance theory in hope of providing some useful suggestions during the application of self-repair.Based on relevance theory,this thesis applies quantitative and qualitative methods to study self-repair.It chooses The Oprah Winfrey Show as the single data base.During the whole study,the thesis intends to answer the following three questions: 1.What are the characteristics of self-repair in TV talk shows? 2.What are the reasons contributing to the occurrence of these characteristics in view of relevance theory? 3.What pragmatic and social functions does self-repair possess in TV talk shows? Based on SJS and Levelt’s classifications of self-repair,the thesis chooses ten programs from The Oprah Winfrey Show from 1993 to 2011 randomly which contain139 extracts of self-repair in total.Then,the author classifies these extracts based on repair structure,form and purpose.From the perspective of repair structure,self-repair is basically divided into self-initiated self-repair and other-initiated self-repair.From the perspective of form,self-repair contains three types which are phonetic self-repair,lexical self-repair and syntactic self-repair.From the perspective of purpose,self-repair is divided into seven types which include delaying the production of next lexical expression,expressing accuracy,expressing plan variation,gaining lexical or syntactic understanding,correcting mishearing errors,correcting speaking errors and creating humor effect.The result of the study shows that all these different kinds of classifications of self-repair have different proportions.From the aspect of structure,self-initiated self-repair occupies an absolutely higher proportion than other-initiated self-repair.From the perspective of form,lexical self-repair occupies a dominant position whose proportion is higher than both phonetic self-repair and syntactic self-repair.From the perspective of purpose,delaying the production of next lexical expression obtains the highest proportion while correcting mishearing errors occupies the lowest proportion.After summarizing these characteristics of self-repair,the author analyzes them from the perspective of communication and relevance based on relevance theory.At last,the author concludes the pragmatic functions and social functions of self-repair.