Advice In Mandarin Family Talk: A Conversational Analysis Perspective

This thesis focuses on advice in Mandarin family talk. The analysis is based on a corpus of audios, videos, and telephone calls mainly from five families. The main research question is how advice is given and responded in family talk. The concern within family is brought for considering the array of advice structure in the talk.Introduction addresses research object, research question, research significance, research procedure, conversation studying methodology, data and transcriptions.Chapter 1 is literature review, which summarizes the achievements in institutionalized context. The asymmetry between experts and layman, the guiding principles of institution have affected the structure of advice in interaction.Chapter 2 addresses the feature and structure of advice, which serves as the base for the following chapters. Directives, informatives, and benefitives are considered as the three prominent features of advice, based on the definition of Searle(1969). The advice schema is discussed under the research of Lv Mingchen(2005).Chapter 3 deals with the structure of Quanshuo. Pre-Quanshuo sequence cluster is unique in the data. Directive pre-Quanshuo sequence is more frequent than informative pre-Quanshuo sequence and benefitive pre-Quanshuo sequence. When Quanshuo is in first pair part of adjacency pair, problem implicit and explicit appear in the Quanshuo.When Quanshuo is in second pair part of adjacency pair, Quanshuo is usually the response to seeking Quanshuo or displaying personal problems. The responses to Quanshuo are bare acceptance, bare refusal, self-account refusal, other-account refusal, inter-turn silence and epistemic independence response.Chapter 4 deals with the structure of Tixing. The fist pair part is the only position of Tixing which are news delivering Tixing and concerning Tixing. The responses to advice are bare acceptance, bare refusal, account with refusal and epistemic independence response.Chapter 5 deals with the structure of Zhufu. The reciprocal feature of Zhufu sequence cluster indicates the courtesies. When advice is in first pair part of adjacency pair, problem implicit and explicit appear in the advice.When Zhufu is in second pair part of adjacency pair, Zhufu is usually the response to seeking Zhufu or farewell. The responses to advice are bare acceptance, epistemic independence response, topic-shift response and perfunctory response.Chapter 6 is the summary of structure of advice in Mandarin family talk. It concludes that Quanshuo is applied to solve problem, Tixing is applied in information-hinting, and Zhufu is tended to manage family relationships. The above structure of advice is explained from the concern aspect in family, which is accelerated by the separateness of interactional space and labor of domestic responsibility.Limitation and future development are discussed in the summary part.