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

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, University of Bonn, language: English, abstract: 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.