A Conversation Analysis Of Receivers In The Wilderness

Modern linguistics originated from structuralism founded by F. de Saussure, whose great contribution is to distinguish"langue"and"parole". It is the concept of"parole"that formed the foundation of conversation analysis, and it is F. de Saussure who made speech a hot topic in academic field. The first real light of conversation analysis can be traced to the mid-1960s. It was done by a group of ethnomethodologists such as Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson. In their studies, conversation analysis is primarily concentrated on naturally occurring conversation, because they felt that it is the basic form of all talks. Yet, in the course of its development, conversation analysis has been the study of talk-in-interaction. It has been used to analyze different types of talk, such as talk in daily life, talk in novels, talk in drama, talk in interview, talk in news etc. And it has received the attention of various fields, such as psychology, socio-linguistics, anthropology, and pragmatics and so on. The concept"producer"and"receiver"are proposed by pragmatists in their study of conversations.Through a general survey conversations studies, we can find that they mainly focus on the analysis of producers, or producers and receivers comprehensively. Receivers, also an essential part in conversations, are ignored. Unlike the former studies, the present paper will focus on receiver. Based on the data collected from Cao Yu's famous and controversial drama The Wilderness, the paper will analyze (1) receivers'roles and their switching, (2) receivers'strategies of turn-taking, and (3) their responding act and challenging act, with a purpose to prove that the three have an active role in constructing the relationship between characters.There are eight parts in the paper. Part one is to introduce the main contents of the paper and its layout; Part two is to review what has been done by the former; Part three is to introduce the research framework; Part four is to analyze receivers'roles and their switching; Part five is to analyze receivers'strategies of turn-taking; Part six is to analyze receivers'responding act and challenging act; Part seven is to make full use of findings to prove that the switching of receivers'roles, their strategies of turn-taking, and their responding act and challenging act play an important role in constructing the relationship between characters; Part eight is to conclude the results of the research and summarize its limitations for further study.