Research On Supporting Feedback In Chinese Natural Conversation

Most work in the area of the conversation focuses on the verbal and nonverbal behavior of the speaker, while ignore the verbal and nonverbal behavior of the listener, and its pragmatic function. Different from existing research, in this work, we pay close attention to the verbal and non-verbal behavior of the listener. To do this work, a lot of conversation corpuses are collected from daily life, and we emphasize the functionality of supportive feedback in the conversation and provide a novel perspective to conversation research. This research combines conversation analysis theory, speech act theory, linguistics and other interactive social theory and methodology, and also integrates qualitative methods with quantitative methods. It explains the meaning and definition of supportive feedback in Chinese language, classifies its type in Chinese conversation by selecting the appropriate examples to demonstrate the relevant arguments from a large number of conversation corpus.Meanwhile, based on constructed natural conversation corpus, the study also investigated the usage of supportive verbal feedback in Chinese natural usage, explores the influence of social factors on the supportive verbal feedback. This approach, which is kind of investigation of conversation using conversation, is different from existing study, which deduces and explains the pragmatic phenomenon just based on the sense of the language. It improves the credibility and reliability of this research, which uncovers some real rules to advance the conversation. Furthermore, this thesis also considers the nod act of the listener, which belongs to nonverbal supportive feedback in Chinese natural conversation. In general, this thesis consists of 6 chapters:This first chapter is introduction, which includes the origin of this research, its significance, the innovation, the research framework, theoretical and research methods, corpus collection and transfer writing technique, and illustration of some basic concepts.The second chapter is related work. The first section discusses the existing research in the area of feedback signal, consensus feedback signal and supportive feedback both at home and abroad. The second section introduces the problem in the area of supportive feedback, and finds out some issues that this thesis plans to address.The third chapter defines the supportive feedback in Chinese language, and its classification. The first section presents the definition of supportive feedback in Chinese language based on concept of turn-taking, after discussion the difference between feedback signal, supportive feedback and non-supportive feedback. The second section makes a distinction between three functional discourse:supportive feedback and responsive behavior, echo discourse and discourse annotation. The third section discusses the form and pragmatic functions of supportive feedback in Chinese language.The fourth chapter makes a deep discussion of interactive mechanism and characteristics of supportive feedback in Chinese language. The first section summarized the general characteristics of supportive feedback in Chinese language. The second section discusses the specificity of supportive feedback in the conversation of Chinese language. The third section discusses the interactive mechanism of supportive feedback in Chinese language.The fifth chapter makes a systematic study of supportive feedback in Chinese natural conversation based on conversation corpus. The first section presents the questions and explains how to select, sort and extract the conversation. The second, third and fourth sections investigates the form, pragmatic function and the distribution of verbal supportive feedback in Chinese natural conversations, combined with the statistical results. The fifth section makes a conclusion.The sixth chapter discusses the influence of social factors on the verbal supportive feedback in Chinese natural conversations based on collected corpus. The first section analyzes the difference of verbal supportive feedback in the form, pragmatic function and the distribution from the point view of gender. The second section discusses the difference of verbal supportive feedback in the form, pragmatic function and the distribution from the point view of other social factors, and also discusses the cause of these differences.The seventh chapter focuses on the non-verbal supportive feedback in Chinese natural conversation, with a nod behavior as case study based on the corpus collected from interview programs. The first section summarized the non-verbal supportive feedback in Chinese conversation. The second section investigates the usage of nod behavior in conversation. The third section concludes this chapter.The last chapter concludes the research in the area of supportive feedback in Chinese language, and presents the contribution of this thesis.