A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF OPENING AND CLOSING SPEECHES BY MASTERS OF CEREMONY ON REALITY TELEVISION SHOWS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH VERSUS VIETNAMESE

Abstract

The study is an attempt to find out the discourse features of opening and closing speeches delivered by the masters of ceremonies in American and Vietnamese reality television (TV) shows. The data for analysis in this thesis are 160 examples of opening and closing speeches in American English and Vietnamese including 40 examples of each American opening speeches (AOSs), Vietnamese opening speeches (VOSs), American closing speeches (ACSs) and (VCSs) Vietnamese closing speeches in some popular American and Vietnamese reality TV shows. The research is carried out based on the combination of a variety of methods namely qualitative, quantitative, statistics, descriptive, analytic, synthetic, comparative, contrastive and inductive. The study focuses on finding out the similarities and differences between those speeches in terms of their layout, discourse features, syntactic features, lexical features and cohesive devices. It also makes a comparison to discover the similarities and differences of these features between the two languages.The findings will be drawn after analyzing, comparing and contrasting the layout, lexical choice, syntactic features and cohesive devices in AOSs versus VOSs and ACSs versus VCSs. The results marked the significant influence of culture on the discourse features of both Vietnamese and American languages. They can hopefully be beneficial not only for people working as masters of ceremonies (MCs) but also for students, teachers, users of American English and Vietnamese as well as interpreters