An Analysis Of Personalities And Relationships Of The Characters In Two Broke Girls From The Perspective Of Turn-taking

Turns are defined as speaker’s continuous sayings in any time in the process of conversation and the end of a turn is marked by change of role between speaker and listener or one side’s silence or yielding of turn.Turn-taking refers to the process by which people in a conversation decide who is going to speak next.Turn-taking theory was firstly raised by Sacks and his colleagues in the 1970 s.The basic system consists of turn-constructional component and turn-allocation component.Since its appearance,turn-taking system has been applied to analyze concrete materials,and the most common fields include TV talk and doctor-patient interaction.Recently,in order to achieve an explanatory and objective analysis of drama language,lots of researchers at home have tried to apply turn-taking system in drama stylistics.Among them,Yu Dongming and Li Huadong(2001)proposed a model which can be used to analyze dialogues in dramas.This system paved a new way for drama language analysis.Through this system,characters’ personalities and relationships can be revealed and understanding on plot development and characterization of figures can also be improved.With the development of Internet,American sitcoms are well received in China especially among young people.In this thesis,the first season of Two Broke Girls is taken as the research object,and representative groups of dialogues are selected in order to reveal personalities and relationships of main characters.Some modifications have been made to turn-taking model for drama of Yu Dongming and Li Huadong(2001).And five aspects are covered in the analysis:(1)control of topics,(2)classification of turn-types,(3)comparison of turn lengths,(4)calculation of numbers of preferred and dis-preferred answers,(5)application of turn-taking strategies.Among the five parts,the total numbers of turns,average turn length,control of topics,turn types such as interruption and monologue are closely related with personalities and power relations of characters.Meanwhile,preferred and dis-preferred answers are in connection with social status and relations.Speaker that has the most turns and the longest average turn-length tends to win higher power position.And speaker who is eager to control topics and constantly interrupts others tends to have impatient and straightforward personalities.Through revealing features of turn-taking mechanism in Two Broke Girls,this thesis aims to help readers understand personalities and relationships of characters in sitcoms more thoroughly.By combining qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis,a relatively scientific and objective result can be reached to help disclose the nature of language.Thus appreciation level of people can be improved to understand plot development and characterization of figures of sitcom deeply.Besides,Application of turn-taking theory in conversation analysis brings a new way for drama analysis and lays a relatively objective basis for comments on drama works.