Anaphoric Repair In Chinese Conversation

This dissertation reports on a systematic study of anaphoric repair in Chinese conversation. It aims to describe the routine practices that constitute anaphoric repair and account for both the mechanism and process of anaphoric repair and the referential choice in repair sequence. Altogether 280 instances of anaphoric repair from Chinese dramas were collected for our analysis. The dissertation takes a conversation analytic approach to anaphoric repair in data analysis, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. In this study, the following major works have been conducted:Firstly, anaphoric repair has been defined and classified for the first time in our study, so as to lay a solid foundation for the further research in this field. A detailed descriptive study of the four basic patterns of anaphoric repair helps us achieve a full understanding of the organizational properties of anaphoric repair. Findings from our analysis of these data suggest that the structural preferences of anaphoric repair in Chinese conversation concur with the preference account proposed by Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1977) in some respects, but differ in many others. The commonalities and differences between the two preference accounts have been elaborated and the possible causes of the differences have been analyzed. Secondly, a detailed survey of initiation types and techniques, and repair strategies has been carried out respectively on the basis of our data. It is argued that the initiation techniques are an overt manifestation of the initiation types, and different repair strategies may be adopted in different types of anaphoric repair. Detailed analysis shows that initiation techniques may differ with respect to the strength or the capacity to locate the reparandum, and thus a scale of initiation techniques in anaphoric repair has been proposed and elaborated. Thirdly, in order to probe into the mechanism of anaphoric repair and its referential choice, a statistical study of referential distribution in anaphoric repair has been conducted. On the basis of these analyses, we suggest the Cooperative Principle of Anaphoric Reference (CP of Anaphoric Reference for short), which is composed of three maxims, namely, Clarity, Intelligibility and Felicity. It is argued that this principle and its maxims manipulate anaphoric repair at every stage. Different types of anaphoric repair may be triggered by the violation of different maxims of the principle. In addition, a general procedure of anaphoric repair has been proposed in the form of a flow chart, which can adequately explain where and when anaphoric repair may occur. And fourthly, repairs of pronominal forms are approached from both pragmatic and cognitive perspectives. It is found that this type of anaphoric repair results from either the discrepancy between the speaker's assumption and the listener's assessment of the accessibility status of the referent, or the speaker's ignorance of its accessibility status. The Economy Principle and the Clarity Principle are governing the use of this type of repair. And on the linguistic level, repairs of pronominal forms are indeed a type of repair sequence in which a higher accessibility marker is repaired by a lower accessibility marker. Finally, a pragmatic and cognitive model of anaphoric repair is advanced for a comprehensive and synthetic interpretation of repairs of pronominal forms.