Delicacy In Requesting In Mandarin-a Conversation Analytic Approach

As a ubiquitous social action,requesting has been the subject of a rich body of research in pragmatics,cross-cultural pragmatics,sociolinguistics,second language acquisition and Conversation Analysis,etc.However,research on requesting in Chinese conversation using the methodology of Conversation Analysis is rare.This study aims to fill this gap and takes requesting as the research object.It will analyze how requests are made and what practices are mobilized to perform a request.Specifically,this study will demonstrate how requesters construct delicacy when making a request.And based on these displayed visible features,this study explore will the underlying mechanism for requesting in interaction.This thesis draws on a corpus of 600-minute audio-recorded naturally occurring telephone conversations,and conducted an in-depth analysis of all the requesting sequences identified from the corpus.The findings are presented in Chapters Four and Five.Chapter Four focuses on speakers' deployment of sequential resources in constructing requests as a delicate social action.It is found that requests are seldom directly delivered;they are frequently preceded by pre-requests and goings-in-front-of-requests.The former are utilized to deal with three matters: to check preconditions or possibilities of granting of requests;to delay the occurrence of requests and to solicit a pre-emptive offer without explicitly launching a request.The pre-pre,one particular type of pre-requests,usually saves the space for introduction of background,pre-condition or both,which enables the sequence to proceed to the initiation of a request and delays the request sequentially.The latter is intrinsically related to the base sequence – request sequence,projecting request to some extent.It is employed to pave the way for the occurrence of a request,cushioning abruptness and embarrassment of direct delivery of the requested action.Bridging,a particular type of goings-in-front-of-requests,serves to bridge the gap between the beginning of conversation and the initiation of requesting,and to avoid requesting out of the blue.Chapter Five zooms in to examine the minute details in the construction of the turn that implements the action of requesting.It is found that designs of the “requesting” turn fully demonstrate requesters' delicate treatment of their requesting through five typical ways.Deferring request proper is often used in the turn of requesting,whether by turn initial delays or by other actions as preface to request proper.The second way is packaging accounts in the request turn,by which the untowardness of requesting is managed,the request is legitimized and the nature of face-threatening of requesting is accounted for.By providing appreciation,the third way serves to offset requestee's costs to some extent,thereby implicitly acknowledging a benefit-cost relationship in requesting.This kind of relationship is fully indexed in the fourth means including minimal portrayal of requesting,minimization of costs of requesting to requestees and maximization of benefits of requesting to requesters.And the last one is about the choice of imperatives,interrogatives and declaratives to initiate a request.These three lexical-syntactic formats are clearly showing how intrinsic imposition of requesting on requestees is minimized according to different sequential positions.Chapter Six offers a discussion of the driving force of delicacy in requesting.Altruism is the intrinsic engine for delicacy.The practices exploited both in sequence organization and turn design of requesting demonstrate the requester's altruistic orientation when the self-interested nature of requesting cannot be changed.They are the normative way of doing requests,which is governed by taken-for-granted social norms.Requesters may so take social norms for granted that only when their ways of initiating a request violate social norms will they suddenly be aware of the fact that they have grounds for doing so.When social norms are violated,social solidarity might be harmed.Thus,as demonstrated in the data,delicacy of requesting is the achievement of the participants who orient to social norms and social solidarity is the consequence of being delicate in doing request.Chapter Seven concludes the thesis with a further discussion on the findings and contribution of the study.This thesis not only identifies seen-but-unnoticed practices employed by social members to do request,which are also features of doing being delicate while performing the action of request,but also interprets the link between these visible features and those invisible mechanisms upon which delicacy is achieved in participants' talk-in-interaction,in which requesting is initiated as the way it is.