TV programs about „infotainment‟

The discourse of ‗infotainment‘ is the focus of the analysis. The word ‗infotainment‘ is used firstly to record the transformation of news discourse from impersonal and informative

62

to sensational (Monclús & Vicente-Mariño 2010). The term now also refers to broadcasts that offer information in a lighthearted, entertaining way (Rosenwald 2019). Discourse in three infotainment programs are analyzed—the travel program 食尚玩家 shisang wanjia ‗Super Taste,‘ the talk show 二分之一強 erfenzhiy qiang ‗Half and Half,‘ and WTO 姐妹會 WTO

jiemei hui ‗WTO Sister Show.‘ The travel program Super Taste first started with

recommending local tourists spots in Taiwan. The production crew members are renowned for their relatively local, grass root identity. The program is mostly in Taiwan Mandarin and Taiwanese. After the show gained popularity, they started to feature foreign spots. Half and Half, a talk show, features a number of foreigners living in Taiwan and is hosted by two

Taiwanese. The show is mostly in Mandarin Chinese, though the guest speakers‘ native languages can also be heard on the show. Cultural issues are a common theme in the program.

There are specific episodes that discuss language issues, including English education in Taiwan and the guest speakers‘ non-native English use. WTO Sister Show, as the title suggests, assimilates the talk show to international seminars at WTO. The talk show also features a number of foreign guests sharing their experiences of living in different countries.

The talk show is also mostly in Mandarin Chinese.

Several major concerns should be noted about collecting and analyzing infotainment discourse in the three programs. First, the discourse that is broadcast features an abundance of multi-party talking, partially scripted and partially impromptu. The discourse survives

63

post-editing. This implies that it is under repeated surveillance at the time of interaction and in post-production (Bell & Gibson 2011). As surveillance imposes regulatory force, mediated linguistic practice is expected to both conform to and actively reproduce norms shared in the speech community. These programs make the ideologizing process overt with humorous discourse. Second, the three programs are popular for at least several years. This suggests that they enjoy steady audienceship and successfully offer entertainment. The steady audienceship also entails the contents are less likely to be controversial, unrepresentative or genre-specific.

This considerably lowers the undesired possibility of collecting rare examples. Furthermore, the three programs also possess respective distinctions that together further strengthen the arguments. To analyze conversational joking qualitatively, the study carefully selects episodes that cover more types of crosslinguistic humor. A foremost element is English proficiency

levels, or to be more specific, onstage representations of English proficiency. The study sees the hosts‘ onstage portrayal of English proficiency as a threshold to include examples of

English-related humor from proficient English users, intermediate English users and basic English users. The hosts from the three programs show diverse onstage images in terms of proficiency levels. Super Taste is hosted by a duo, AX and HZ.² AX is a basic English user while AX is an English users at the intermediate level. Half and Half is hosted by Vincent and Karen. Karen is a proficient English user while Vincent has an onstage persona of being a

2 There are several hosts in the program. To observe multi-party discourse and to carefully collect data from English users at different proficiency levels, the study focuses on the discourse in episodes hosted by AX and HZ.

64

basic English user. Ryan and Alexia, the hosts of WTO Sister Show, are both known for being highly educated and eloquent. The hosts‘ diverse competence levels in English are expected to diversify the humorous linguistic practice the study observes. The episodes analyzed in the study, all aired between Year 2012 to 2019, are viewed on their respective official YouTube channels and transcribed for later analysis. Screens pertaining to the study are captured and stored digitally. In total, data from 10 episodes with the length of approximately 561 minutes are analyzed. Table 1 shows the title, length and link of each episode.

Table 1. The titles, links and length of the 10 episodes of infotainment programs analyzed in the study.

title and link aired on length (min.)

食尚玩家 下一站時尚之都米蘭

(‗Super Taste. The next stop, Milan, a fashion capital.‘)

(‗Taiwanese love lao yingwen!? What do Taiwanese new immigrants say?‘)

65 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_5Knc4NmTk

聯合國英語大會考！老外英文沒有你想的厲 害？！

(‗English test! Laowai‘s English is not a great as you imagine.‘)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_R_1NITvU8

March 08, 2017 125

台灣藝人英文太爛 全場集體崩潰？！

(‗Taiwanese artists speak English so badly that every guest on the scene cracks up.‘)

(A competition for the most popular English teachers.) discourse that either adopts linguistic elements in English or concerns metadiscourse about English use in a Chinese- or Taiwanese- dominant context. The analysis therefore leans heavily on relevant studies on Rampton (1995)‘s language crossing and Myers-Scotton‘s (1998) Markedness Model, both of which discuss how adopting a different language serves social purposes. Besides, the study consequently takes a broad, multimodal view on defining crosslinguistic humor. For one, the relation between laughter and humor is argued to be open to discussion (Raskin 1985). For another, what is regarded as funny varies from person to person. To determine whether a stretch of discourse is humorous, the study takes the