A Statistical and Pragmatic Analysis on Questioning in Chinese TV Interview Programs

Abstract

Pragmatically, questioning is a special kind of speech act and language use, which can fulfill many pragmatic functions. The host’s every questioning utterance in TV interview programs means to perform some actions; thus it has been a fascinating research theme across many linguistic disciplines. The study applies SPSS 20.0 to conduct a statistical analysis on questioning’s syntactical formulation and its functions involved in TV interview programs in details. Based on collected data from three famous TV interview programs in China and with the help of SPSS 20.0, descriptive analysis and crosstabs analysis are implemented and relevant statistical results are then generated in terms of Stacked Bar Charts and Drop Line Charts. The statistical findings show that wh-questions and yes/no questions are the two predominant syntactical forms of questioning applied by hosts in these three TV interview programs and that the hosts’ questioning is designed mainly to realize these four pragmatic functions: topic and turn managing, information seeking and checking, positioning taking and sympathy arousing. Based on naturally occurring data from institutional talk, this quantitative study can thus serve as a point of departure and guideline for future questioning research in the flourishing multi-media era.