A Multi-dimensional Study Of Emotional Utterances In Chinese Complaint Conversations

This dissertation employs the conversation analytic approach to study emotional utterances in Chinese complaint conversations. Drawn on insights from sociolinguistics and pragmatics, it aims to investigate the features and performances of emotional utterances as well as their inseparable associations with frames and stances in interaction.Emotional utterances in the current study are conceptualized as any utterances containing affective information, including the concept of emotion talk, i.e., the linguistic expressions that explicitly denote emotions, and the concept of emotional talk, i.e., the linguistic expressions that implicitly refer to emotions. Emotional utterances are an essential part of what constitutes human communication. Whenever we talk with each other, there is a latent but great potential for emotional utterances to occur in conversation. People use emotional utterances as important means of performing various kinds of speech act. Hence, the connections between language and emotion have aroused scholars’interest in a variety of fields, ranging over cognitive linguistics, linguistic anthropology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, pragmatics, and so forth.More specifically, the cognitive linguistic approach focuses on how emotions are shaped by human embodied experience through the study of metaphors and metonymies. The linguistic anthropological approach takes an interest in comparing the linguistic expression of emotions across languages and cultures. Psycholinguists pay special attention to such topics as the development of emotional language in childhood and the way in which language constructs emotions in the course of language acquisition. On the basis of empirical investigations of the linguistic data, sociolinguists aim to explore the social experience of using emotional language across contexts. The computational linguistic perspective concentrates on the construction of emotional speech databases and the detection, classification and interpretation of emotions in talking and writing in natural language processing. The pragmatic approach deals with a range of issues like how interactants with different social background perform emotion-implicative acts, how speakers manipulate emotional utterances purposefully and how hearers interpret them correspondingly, etc. As the above studies shown, it is prevalent to treat emotional utterances as socially and culturally constructed linguistic phenomena, which are constrained by such contextual factors as speaking subjects, objects, situations, registers, and so forth.Though aforementioned studies of emotional utterances are fruitful, it is insufficient to investigate emotional utterances without reference to the notions of frame and stance. In fact, there are close affinities between emotional utterances, frames and stances in spoken and written texts. Their interplays can be manifested in various contexts and are pivotal for interpreting on-going conversations. In this dissertation, emotional utterances are regarded as social speech acts with communicative as well as interpersonal functions in interaction, which are vital social constitutive means of formulating frames and indispensable linguistic resources for coding stances. A frame is reckoned as what interactants think they are doing in the process of talking with others. Framing refers to the dynamic process of formulating certain frames. The nature of framing is an evaluative act of alignment or disalignment, which is consistent with the tri-act of taking up a stance, namely, evaluation, positioning and (dis)alignment. Emotional utterances contribute to the construction of specific frames via the work of stancetaking in interaction, and serve as a crucial way for participants to negotiate their social relations and cultural positions. In the meantime,"stance always invokes, explicitly or implicitly, presupposed systems of sociocultural value"(Du Bois,2007, p.173). So to speak, the socio-cultural values of the conversation participants can be indexed from the stances they take in dialogic interactions. In addition, the concepts of style and social identity are also considered as special patterns of stance. An interactant’s style consists of smaller and more variable elements known as stances and his/her social identity is "the cumulation of stances taken over time"(Jaffe,2009a, p.11).By extending the findings of Bateson’s (1972) and Goffman’s (1974,1981) framing theories and Du Bois’s (2007) stance theory, this dissertation proposes four primary research objectives:(a) to observe some important aspects of emotional utterances in Chinese complaint conversations, including linguistic triggers, essential features, discursive strategies of the participants, and functions of the strategic use of emotional utterances;(b) to investigate the way in which emotional utterances contribute to the construction of frames through stances and shifting styles in framing complaints in Chinese conversations, say, framing complaints about the recipient(s), framing third-party complaints, framing self-complaints and framing reproduced complaints;(c) to examine how speakers strategically and deliberately manipulate emotional utterances to perform particular stance actions and express emotions, and how hearers make sense of them in the course of seeking common understanding in Chinese complaint conversations; (d) to explore the manner in which styles and social identities co-construct stances and the indexical relationships between them in Chinese complaint conversations.To address those issues, this dissertation takes the complaint conversation as a specific frame because complaining is a typical emotion-arousing activity in mundane cultural practices. The linguistic data are composed of33extracts of Chinese complaint conversations that are gleaned from a Chinese TV drama and two programs. They involve multiple complaining situations and participants with different social identities. Conversation analysis is adopted as a methodological tool for analyzing those data because it offers insights into examining the sequential and interactional facets of emotional utterances that are relevant to the evaluation of the stance objects (objectivity), positioning of the speaking subjects (subjectivity) and (dis)alignment between speakers (intersubjectivity) in Chinese complaint speech acts.After a comparatively in-depth study of the linguistic data, this dissertation has found seven common linguistic triggers to emotional utterances in Chinese complaint conversations, including rejections, breakdowns in turn-talking organization (interruptions and overlaps), rhetorical questions, irony, metapragmatic comments, inappropriate person-referring expressions and profanity. In addition, three essential features of emotional utterances have been verified in Chinese complaint conversations in terms of negative emotion inferability, attitudinal negativity and face-threatening effect. Further, several discursive strategies that are frequently utilized by speakers to fulfill respective interactional goals have been introduced, comprising rhetorical questions, echoic expressions, deictic expressions, projected alignments and delayed disalignments. Moreover, four primary functions of the strategic use of emotional utterances in Chinese complaint conversations have been described, i.e., appealing for sympathy and support, projecting stances and identities, putting pressure on the recipient(s)(motivation or refraining), and mitigation. Apart from those aspects of emotional utterances in Chinese complaint conversations, this dissertation has also manifested that the interactional management of emotional utterances is a critical resource which allows participants to convey stances and frame complaints. The speakers try to make use of emotional utterances to position themselves in relation to the complainable objects and to other conversation partners in a socially and culturally appropriate manner. Participants thus discursively and strategically manage emotional utterances to negotiate their stances and social relations. In doing so, their social identities are reflected in the process of position-taking and style-shifting.In spite of the fact that the investigation in this dissertation is neither comprehensive nor conclusive, it functions as an initial step to recognize and understand how emotional utterances construct frames through stances in different ways and highlights the social and interpersonal natures of emotional utterances. This dissertation has put an emphasis on Chinese complaint conversations, which is complementary to the earlier studies primarily focusing on English context. Although the research findings shall not be extended to other types of frames randomly, they prove that emotional utterances and their affinities with frames and stances can be examined both in a bottom-up way, as demonstrated in the microanalysis of emotional utterances in Chinese complaint conversations, and in a top-down way, as the examples interpreted from the perspective of broader socio-cultural ideologies.