Assessments In Daily Conversations And Institutional Talks

Conversation analysis, which originated from 1960s in America, is a branch of sociology. The founder of this subject is Harvey Sacks, who develops the approach of studying conversation analysis, accompanied with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. We call this method a science because it is based on the real conversations and it never poses any theory without a lot of research on a certain aspect. Conversation analysis concerns about the features and rules when people have talks. When scholars use the method of conversation analysis, they find a strategy nearly all the people use in their interactions—making assessments.In the study of assessment strategy, a number of linguists make great contributions which provide new angles of research. Among these articles, On the Preferences for Agreement and Contiguity in Sequences in Conversation written by Harvey Sacks, Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments:some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes written by Anita Pomerantz, and Concurrent Operation on Talk:Notes on the Interactive Organization of Assessments written by Charles Goodwin & Marjories Harness Goodwin are cited frequently by other scholars. They discuss assessment strategy in different perspective.The predecessors did profound researches in the aspects of assessment theories and the sequence of assessments. Based on preferred organization (Heritage,1984:267), preferred/dipreferred turn shapes (Anita,1984:57) and preference for contiguity in sequence (Harvey Sacks,1987:54), this thesis aims at revealing the features of assessment strategy in daily conversations and institutional talks, as well as comparing the differences in these two settings. In order to demonstrate the features, many corpuses have been collected. Daily conversations include restaurant conversations, dormitory conversations, and bus conversations and so on. Institutional talks include institutional inquiry, TV interviews and so on. All data have been collected in a natural condition. The transcription of these data is based on transcription conventions, which has been firstly developed by Gail Jefferson. One basic criterion is that all transcription should be based on real recordings without any adaptation or creation.The first chapter will present the object of my research, the rationale of the research, the research methodology and corpus collection. The second chapter will review the relevant literature on assessment. We classify the literature into three groups:the article on assessment theories, the assessment in the school teachings and the assessment in the doctor-patient interactions, which are the most popular topics among the linguistic scholars these years.In the third part, we will explain some important theories used in this thesis, such adjacency pair, pre-expansion/post-expansion, preferred/dispreferred organization and so on.In the following two chapters, we will focus on the assessment in daily conversations and institutional talks separately. In the fourth part, we will discuss the different forms of agreement and disagreement in daily communication on the base of Anita's theories. What's more, we will analyze the preferred organization of agreement and dispreferred organization of disagreement.In the fifth chapter, we will turn to institutional talks. The corpuses mainly come from two organizations:commercial activities and media interviews. we will focus on the assessing turn shapes and sequence organizations.The sixth chapter will make contrast between the assessments in daily conversation and institutional talks.The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis. In this chapter, we will conclude the major findings of this thesis and propose some limitation and suggestion.