A Genre Based Approach to Daytime Talk on Television.

Three initial reasons prompted this study: 1. The first reason was to find out the means by which language is used to manipulate people as well as ideology and social structure: the Tabloid Talkshow, because of its topics and participants can be said to be a conflictive scenario which brings out ideologies that are not socially acceptable. 2. The second reason was more related to the view of the Tabloid Talkshow as a mass communication and socio-cultural phenomenon and concerned the task of showing the inside of a genre that is growing in popularity and has been exported to and copied by other countries. Hence, with hindsight it would be interesting to analyse and evaluate this international evolution as compared with Tabloid Talkshows in the US, where they originated. As Fairclough (1994:1) claims "consciousness is the first step towards emancipation." 3. The third reason was that talkshows, in general, are social processes that unfold linguistically as texts (cf. Ventola 1987:3), and as such they could well be used in language pedagogy and culture and media studies. My purpose in writing this book is more related, however, to the third reason. I am specifically interested in looking at the way talk is organised in Tabloid Talkshows, and in how participants "talk an institution into being" (Heritage 1984:290). I will provide a description of the distribution of talk among the different categories participating in the Tabloid Talkshow, in order to find out the possible asymetries and the constraints on the types of contributions that the genre conventions impose on the participants. The analytical approach taken is based on a dynamic view of genre already expressed by Hymes (1972). Hymes (1972), as quoted by McCarthy (1998) "stresses the dynamic characteristic of genres and separates them from the speech event itself: i.e., a genre may coincide with a speech event, but genres can also occur within speech events, and the same genre can show variation in different speech events." McCarthy argues in favour of such a view of spoken genres and states that "genre is a useful concept that captures the recurrent, differing social compacts (i.e. co-operative sets of behaviour) that participants enter upon in unfolding discourse processes, whether in speaking or writing."