Research On The Tag Expressions In Natural Spoken Chinese From An Interactional Perspective

As an important category of grammatical system,questioning is existed extensively in human languages and closely related to a variety of social actions in human interaction.Among them,tag expressions are resources for social interaction because of their features of flexible distribution,high using frequency,and fine-grained interactional functions,which also made them the focus of many studies.Based on the data of 97 hours audio and video recordings of everyday face-to-face conversation conducted among native speakers of Mandarin,this paper systematically investigates the cross-fertilization between the tag expressions and social actions from an interactional perspective.The thesis is composed of seven chapters.Chapter 1 introduces the research objects and reviews the previous studies of the tag expressions in Mandarin.The objects of research include 12 interrogative formats,such as"shi bu shi"(是不是)/"dui bu dui’(对不对)/"hao bu hao"(好不好)/"xing bu xing"(行不行)/"shi ba"(是吧)/"dui ba"(对吧)/"hao ba"(好吧)/"xing ba"(行吧)/"shi ma"(是吗)/"dui ma"(对吗)/"hao ma"(好吗)/"xing ma"(行吗).Chapter 2 provides an account of the database used in the study,clarifies the transcription system and conventions used in representing the data in this thesis,and explains major methodological framework,from which the analyses in the following chapters set out.The data for this thesis are approximately 97 hours of audio-and video-recorded Mandarin face-to-face conversations.Participants in the conversations all speak standard Mandarin.They were friends,colleagues and classmates.Various settings and constellations of participants are selected to guarantee that the result is not context-and participant-specific.The conversations in the study are transcribed according to GAT-2(Gesprachsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2)transcription system with modifications adapted to Mandarin.The research method used in the present study is informed by Conversation Analysis(CA)and Interactional Linguistics(IL).Based on the qualitative and statistical analysis of 97 hours Mandarin face-to-face interaction,chapter 3 focuses on the usage of the tag expressions,which include the following items:syntactic forms,using frequency in communication,sequential positions and the restriction of interrogative degree to the answering system.According to statistical analysis of data,it is observed that "X ba" is the most frequently used tag expression,which account for 65.68%of the total number(N=2436)."X bu X" and "X ma" are less frequently used than "X ba".The result shows that the tag expressions,in general,have high frequency of being used at the first pair part of "question-response" adjacency pairs.The data further demonstrates that the interrogative degree of interrogative formats affects its responding system.Chapter 4 explores the response function of"shi ba" and "shi ma" in three different types of informing sequences,and compares their interactional differences by adopting the method of positionally sensitive grammar.The findings are as follows:1)The first position is volunteered informing sequence in which the informing is voluntarily initiated and offered by the informer,and the response of the volunteered informing is the second-position response.The backward-oriented news receipt "shi ba" often emphasizes the recipient’s reception of the information;while the forward-oriented Newsmark"shi ma" is used to indicate that the information is unknown to the recipient.2)The second position is question-elicited informing sequence.In this sequence,the informing is elicited by a question from a recipient,therefore,a response to a question-elicited informing is the third-position response.The recipient may have assumptions and expectations for the information."Shi ba" shows that the information provided by the informer is quantitatively sufficient for the recipient and sequence closure is appropriate;while"shi ma" indicates that the information provided by the informer is insufficient for the recipient,so it is necessary to continue the topic,expend the sequence,and provide more relevant information.3)The third position is refuting the pre-prior talk informing sequence.The interaction purpose of informing in this sequence is to refute the information in the pre-prior talk.And the response"shi ma"in the third position indicates the resistance of the recipient.Chapter 5 describes the interactional functions of "X ba" and the prosodic and bodily-visual features involved in its production.An examination of the data shows that,in addition to acting as tag question for the speaker request confirmation,seek affiliation or request permission from the recipient,some new interactional functions of "X ba" have emerged,such as seek acknowledgement,response feedback,bridging interrupted topics,emphasizing stance and so on.When the interrogative formats of "X ba" is used as tag question,some specific bodily-visual features always appear simultaneously,such as the speaker usually stares at the hearer,or leans forward toward the hearer until s/he receives the response.Such bodily-visual features may not occur when the tag expressions serving as discourse markers.Through the analysis of audio-recorded materials,we found that there are no differences in phonetic features when the tag expressions acting as tag question or discourse marker,while the distribution of the tag expressions in the sequential position will affect their prosody-phonetics features.After reviewing the research findings of previous studies on the interactional functions of the tag expressions,chapter 6 examines the emerging motivations from the interactive context and explores the internal connections between tag expressions and discourse markers,and represents the evolutionary path with a diagram.We found that the using frequency,sequential position,epistemic position and the change of speaker’s stance are four motivators of the emergence.Chapter 7 summarizes the main conclusions drawn from this research,reflects on the interactional perspective and methodology adopted in this thesis.The innovation of this paper is mainly reflected in the following aspects.First,based on the methods of empirical materials and data-driven,syntactic forms,using frequency,and sequential positions of the tag expressions in natural spoken Chinese are thoroughly investigated.Second,different from single sentence aspect,this research compares the interactional differences between"shi ba" and "shi ma" as response in three different types of informing sequences by adopting the method of positionally sensitive grammar,and provides evidence that grammatical forms are positionally sensitive and sequence-specific.Third,we regard the tag expressions as interactional resources for social actions,and explore the cross-fertilization between grammatical forms and social actions.In this study,we observe that the tag expressions have fine-grained interactional functions.Fourth,by taking into account the resources of multiple modalities,this study contributes to our understanding of the multimodal complexity of Mandarin face-to-face interaction.Fifth,the research explores the influence of stance-taking,epistemic position and other factors on the interactional functions from the perspective of interactional linguistics.