"We Have a Great Show Tonight!" A Contrastive Study on Compliment Use Among US-American and British Television Hosts of Late-Night Talk Shows

Term Paper , 2014 , 19 Pages , Grade: 2,3

American Studies - Linguistics

How do US-American and British TV show hosts of talk shows differ in terms of compliment use? In what part of the show, how often, on what topic and in which context do they use compliments? This paper aims at answering these questions with a focus on late-night talk shows, exemplarily shown with one episode in each case. The US-American late-night talk show that was chosen to take data from is The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the British counterpart that was picked for this compliment research is The Jonathan Ross Show, concentrating on the compliments of the hosts, namely Jimmy Fallon and Jonathan Ross.

First there will be an overview of previous research on compliments on the one hand and talk shows on the other, coming to the method that has been chosen to gather the data, the structure of talk shows in general and in the case of the late-night talk shows this paper deals with, ending with presenting the results of this research on compliments.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 Literature Review

3 Method

4 Talk Shows and Their Structure
4.1 The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
4.2 The Jonathan Ross Show

5 Results
5.1 Position in Discourse and Frequency
5.2 Context
5.3 Compliment Topics

6 Discussion

7 Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendices

Appendix 1 Compliments from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Appendix 2 Compliments from The Jonathan Ross Show

Appendix 3 Compliment Frequency of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Appendix 4 Length of the Sections of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Appendix 5 Compliment Frequency of The Jonathan Ross Show

Appendix 6 Length of the Sections of The Jonathan Ross Show

• College: University of Bonn
• Grade: 2,3
• Author: Lioba Frings (Author)
• Publication Year: 2014
• Pages: 19
• Catalog Number: V368134
• ISBN (eBook): 9783668465701
• ISBN (Book): 9783668465718
• Language: English
• Tags: talk shows, television, pragmatics, linguistics, american