Talk Show Dialogue
APRIL 2018
Language ambiguity and displacement is something unique to human communication. It allows for creative utterances and deeper abstract understanding of sarcasm, humor, trends, and emotional content (Curzan and Adams, 19). One platform this characteristic exposes itself is live television talk shows. This specific analysis focuses on the transcription of a 2009 and 2018 episode of an American live talk show “Regis and Kelly”, which now is “Live with Kelly and Ryan” to examine the understanding between the audience and speakers. Specifically, the aim of the analysis is to show how from 2009 the ambiguity of the talk show has broadened, and the cohesion tools in the English language have allowed this expansion to progress to present day.
Ann Curzan and Michael Adams, in their textbook How English Work, discuss the defining differences of human communication (19). One of these traits is displacement, or the ability to move forward and backward (19). In other words, it can be termed as the way the human mind can move in and out of communication with an understanding. This trait is important due to the main finding in comparing transcription of the talk shows. A large premise of the talk show in both periods was interrupting or overlapping in speech. This style of speech creates a need for an audience to understand the host thought pattern. Thus, it was observed that the speakers used more filler words or cohesive markers to track their own thoughts and carry their audience along in the narration. The highest example of this was the phrases um/uh in 2009 used fourteen times and like in 2018 used twenty times (See Appendix). For example:
“But um, but now there's like three or four left there, like the last leaves of winter and uh, you know, when the trees are like, just literally the last leaves are falling off the tree, but they've turned into cotton candy now because they've been in the salt water, you know, spring break.” (Ripa, 2017)
These pauses in the dialogue allow for the audience to go back and make logical links and interpretations, however, it also allows recursion of the speaker (Curzan &Adams, 53). The talk show environment is a live situation of language performance where pauses allow for language repair and the ability to adapt.
The Corpus of Contemporary American English exposed that uh spoken frequencies were more popular from 2005-2009 (1.67 per million words) however from 2015-2017 the frequencies were enhanced (1.80 per million words). This was also seen in the 2018 transcript where like was the more frequent utterance. On COCA, the spoken utterance like is not only a higher frequency than um/uh, but also in 2015-2018 appears 890.14 times per million words compared to 557.60 from 2005-2009. The growing frequencies of these two filler word trends could point to a causality between audiences and speaker growing on this style of media platform. They ability fall out of proper syntactic forms when speaking on a live talk show makes it more necessary to fill the dialogue with utterances as a style of verbal hygiene. For example, “Well, uh, you know, I think. Well, I appreciate all Oprah all the more now, you know she uh, did a terrific interview with her” (Regis, 2009). This segment form 2009 shows this recursion and repair in informal spoken English to continue cohesive thought while breaking the formulaic structure. Therefore, this may show the unconscious knowledge the speaker and audience hold of linguistic competence to understand overall spoken meaning through these utterances (Curzan and Adams, 9).
Another major form of engaging the audience is the use of reiterations in both transcriptions. These reiterations of phrases or words are functioning as enhancements or elaborations, trying to clarify or draw attention to the next comment (Curzan and Adams, 282). In the 2009-episode transcript, there were sixteen different moments of reiterations and similarly, in 2018 there were nineteen. For example, “I talk about longevity, but I don’t predict. I don’t predict an end date because that’s tempting everybody to get hit by a bus” (Ripa, 2018). This type of reiteration is functioning as a way to emphasize her point to the audience and relate her feelings to the overall point. “Were you, were you an alcoholic?” is an example where a turn is shown to direct the audience to a question using a reiteration (Fillman, 2009). These styles are straying away from a standard format of English structure but able to be followed in the spoken dialogue. However, the steady frequency of reiterations through the decade may point to the idea that this type of dialogue tactic is steady amongst the discourse media platform.
These types of cohesive tactics allow for what Curzan and Adams support as another key principle of the human language, ambiguity or the ability of multiple interpretations (19). This supports the idea of sarcasm and a deeper phrasal meaning. This contextual meaning was a key difference seen between the two time periods. In the 2018 transcript, there were more examples of implied meaning that required social knowledge and conscious effort. Although the show is based on recent events, the 2018 episode discusses audience has to engage with more previous knowledge. For example, they spend three minutes on the topic of shirtless men in Los Angeles, “If I was shirtless it would be in front of a bar not a juice press because I was drinking the wrong drink” (Seacrest, 2018). This mention of a juice press would need predated knowledge of an audience may not understand the conversation or would need to engage in the ambiguity of understanding what the hosts mean by stereotyping LA. Similarly, the mention of an Instagram account called @PassangerShaming is used in a way to imply a societal meaning that only digital aged audience members may be able to employ. These uses are both presumed by the hosts that the audience is equipped with foregrounded knowledge, which is why phrases of confirmation of understanding such as you know are in higher frequency. On COCA, this you know is confirmed to be spoken more frequently in 2015-2018 from 2005-2009 increasing from 607.53 to 788.21 (per mil words).
These findings may illuminate some future trends about the talk show discourse community’s discursive tactics. The first is the way which speakers relate with their audience is informal in structure due to the constant stream of conscious speech. This structure leads to a high need for pauses or sentence breaks. The informality of breaks is increasing with phrases such as like seen in all spoken discourse. This phrase like may be taking the semantic shift or the place of um/uh however is understood as a placeholder by the audience. Like being used to not only allow them to logically link ideas, but also it may imply there is a higher need for recursion or hygiene before one speaks. Although it is common to think of like as informal, the impromptu nature of television may need for more thought or repair before utterance. Additionally, there is a high amount of reiteration from 2009 to present day. This steady unchanged rate exposes the unconscious human need for engagement to important moments in dialogue or conversation. These types of tactics can ultimately explain how this talk show has progressed to become more ambiguous in its terminology using more social concept and secondary meanings. The ability to backchannel in one’s mind while an utterance such as like occurs allows for one to process larger ideas before a new thought proceeds. This type of language process is typically done unconsciously with language competence. Thus, as information on these platforms require more conscious effort to process content or as the ambiguity, the types of tactics may continue to be needed to create a politeness between intended thoughts, speaker meaning, and audience interpretation.
Works Cited
Curzan, Anne, and Michael Adams. How English Works: A Linguistic Introduction. , 2006.
Davies, Mark. (2008-) The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words, 1990-present. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
"Regis and Kelly / Nov 17 2009 / Keanu Reeves, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt PART 2." YouTube. N.p., 19 Nov. 2009. Web. 16 Apr. 2018.
"Live with Kelly and Ryan(April 12, 2018)Amy Schumer ("I Feel Pretty"); Aisha Tyler
("Archer")." YouTube. N.p., 12 Apr. 2018. Web. 16 Apr. 2018.