This paper investigates the closely-related concepts of conversationalization and democratization in a specialized register, the biographical radio chat show, represented by BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs (DID). To explore these concepts in the show we first undertake a data-driven stylistic analysis of ‘key’ parts-of-speech (POS) tags, i.e. statistically significant grammatical categories that distinguish a corpus of DID talk from a corpus of conversation. We then track these grammatical features over four sampling periods to see what changes occur, and the extent to which they evidence conversationalization and democratization. This process is done separately for guests and hosts, since they each have a different role in the participation framework of the show. Results suggest a clear overall movement across time towards conversational norms and levelling of the differences between guests and hosts. The features that evidence conversationalization are usually but not necessarily evidence of democratization, and vice versa. We relate the findings to the changing contextual environment of the show.

本文研究以BBC广播电台4的《荒岛碟片》（DID）为代表的专门广播电台中的个人电台聊天节目-对话和民主化的密切相关概念。为了在展览中探索这些概念，我们首先对“关键”词性（POS）标签进行数据驱动的文体分析，即区分DID语料库的具有统计意义的语法类别从谈话语料库中进行交谈。然后，我们在四个采样周期内跟踪这些语法特征，以查看发生了什么变化以及它们在多大程度上证明了对话和民主化。此过程是为来宾和主持人分别完成的，因为他们各自在展会的参与框架中扮演着不同的角色。结果表明，随着时间的流逝，总体上朝着对话规范的方向发展了一个清晰的整体运动，并拉近了宾客与主人之间的差异。证明对话的特征通常但不一定是民主化的证据，反之亦然。我们将调查结果与展览不断变化的背景环境联系起来。