Conversation Analysis Of QQ Group Chats

This thesis tries to analyze the collected QQ online group chats with conversation analysis theories. The QQ group chats are online conversations occurring among several people, and these people have a certain kind of relation with one another in real life, so these chats are quite similar with the everyday chats. There has been little study about the conversation analysis of the online conversations, which maybe partly because the informal and casual language is difficult to analyze with the traditional conversation analysis theories which focus on the conversation structure analysis.Based on the characteristics of the online group chats, the author combines Goldberg's move system with four topic-shift types and develops a new analytical framework: first we divide the conversations into small conversation acts and then we assign each conversation acts with a proper move (introducing move, reintroducing move, progressive-holding move and holding move) and identify the place where the topic shift occurs with a procedure; then we distinguish the topic-shift types of these topic shifts based on the characteristics of the four types of topic-shifts. The four kinds of topic shifts adopt in this thesis include coherent topic shifts, renewals, noncoherent topic shifts and inserts.The material used in this thesis is collected from eight people's QQ chats records. The author removes these conversational episodes which last less than 30 minutes and gets 30 conversational episodes. Then she divides these 30 episodes into three groups based on the relation or familiarity degree of the group members. The author analyzes the topic development of each group with the new analytical framework and calculates the topic-shift frequencies and the proportion of each topic-shift types. The author contrasts the results and finds that the more familiar the group members become, the less topic shifts occur and the larger percentage of the coherent topic shifts account for.