A Conversation Analysis Of Advice-giving Sequence In Chinese Mundane Conversation

Advice is a speech act frequently used in daily communication.Previous studies have mainly discussed the pragmatic strategies,textual functions,and contrastive features of advice-giving from the perspectives of pragmatics,discourse analysis,cross-cultural research,etc.and the previous study on advice from the perspective of conversation analysis is mainly based on English conversation,and mainly explored institutional talk.Currently there still lacks research on the turn design,sequential features of advice-giving and responses to advice based on the Chinese mundane conversation from the perspective of conversation analysis.This study,adopting conversation analysis as its methodology,focuses on the organizational structure of advice sequence in Chinese mundane conversation and aims to answer the following three research questions:(1)What language resources do interactants employ to construct turns to implement advice-giving?(2)How advice is responded to?(3)What is the underlying force driving the development of advice sequence?Based on 100 typical advice sequences out of about 500 recordings,this study first focuses on the practices of advice-giving.Through careful observation of a large number of data,three types of practices are discovered to realize advice-giving: imperative-typed advice,declarative-typed advice,and interrogative-typed advice.The study finds that the distribution of the practices is sensitive to their sequential position,which means that the interactional environment has certain impact on the turn design of advice-giving.The imperative-typed practice always occur after an explicit problem,however the declarative-typed practice always occur after a mitigated explicit problem,or when there is an implicit problem or no problem in the prior turns.The interrogative-typed practices always occur after an explicit or an implicit problem.The commonality in the composition of the same type of practices shows that they have similarities in their presupposition and their directiveness.The imperative-typed advice has strong directiveness and the following presuppositions: the advice-recipient has the ability to do the proposed action,and all the essential conditions are available,and the proposed action can solve the problem.The declarative-typed advice has mitigated directiveness and the following presuppositions: the advice-recipient has ability and conditions to carry out the advice,and the proposed action may solve the problem or better the situation of the advice-recipient.The interrogative I-typed advice has least directiveness,and the following presuppositions:the advice-giver does not know whether the advice-recipient has the ability or conditions to carry out the advice,and the involved solution in the interrogative may solve the problem.The interrogative II-typed advice also has strong directiveness,and the presupposition is that the advice-recipient has the ability and conditions to carry out the advice,and the proposed action could solve the advice-recipient’s problem.The features of the sequential position display the effect of interactional environment on the turn design of the advice-giving.The study further studies responses to advice,which could be classified into two categories: acceptance and resistance.Acceptance includes full acceptance,information receipt token and change of state token.In the collected data of daily conversation,the majority of the responses to advice are resistance.The resistance of the advice could be further classified into two types: positive resistance and passive resistance.The distinction lies in that whether there is an explicit or implicit sign to cancel the feasibility of the proposed action.The positive resistance includes rejection,challenging or questioning,proposing of an alternative solution by the advice-recipient,and the passive resistance includes no response and account.The analysis of responses to advice displays that the advice-recipient understands advice-giving as both an informative action and a directive action.In the final part of the thesis,the underlying force driving the development of advice sequence is discussed from epistemic and deontic perspectives.The finding is that the underlying driving force of the advice-sequence is the interactional consequences of both speakers’ epistemic status and deontic status.The congruence or incongruence of the epistemic status and deontic status with their corresponding epistemic stance and denotic stance may result in different interactional consequences: acceptance or resistance of advice.The trajectory of advice-sequence is the result of the contest of epistemic rights and deontic rights between advice-giver and advice-recipient.Besides,in advice sequence,the epistemic status of the interactants is the foundation of their deontic status.This study for the first time analyzes advice sequence in Chinese mundane conversation systematically,covering its sequential environment,the practices of advice-giving and the linguistic features of responses to advice.The theoretical significance of this study lies in its exploration and interpretation of the dynamic relationship among syntactic structures of the turn design of advice-giving,their respective sequential environment,interactants’ epistemic and deontic status.Practically the findings of this study can provide reference for the communicative teaching approach in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language and International Chinese Language Education.