Revelation Of Characters’ Personalities And Relations In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Conversation Analysis

This thesis studies the conversations in Fortress Besieged from the perspective ofconversation analysis, with the goal of exploring how characters’ personalities andrelationship among them are shown with the help of turn-taking mechanism, discourse rolesand their switching and pragmatic ambivalence. The conversation between characters is ofgreat importance to the novel. Specifically, it can fully manifest the personality of characters,demonstrate their relationships and promote plot development. Currently, only a fewresearches adopt the approach of linguistics in studying conversations in the novel and manyof them are from the adaptation theory, relevance theory and code-switching. They arerelatively unsystematic and incomplete. Therefore, conversations between characters inFortress Besieged are worth further exploration.Meanwhile, conversation analysis offers an alternative perspective to the study ofliterature, especially the integrating of static approach of turn-taking mechanism proposed byHarvey Sacks, Grail Jefferson and Emanuel Schegloff with dynamic approach of discourseroles and pragmatic ambivalence put forward by Jenny Thomas, which have a strongerexplanatory power to the conversation of novel. Adjacency pairs, turn length and preferencestructure of turn-taking mechanism are proved to be scientific and objective to analyze how aconversation is unfolded. By switching their discourse roles, characters can show theirpersonalities and reach various communicative purposes with different people. With the helpof pragmatic ambivalence, characters make themselves at a better communicative place.Thereby, they display their personality and relationship with others. Therefore, this thesisapplies these three theories to the study of conversations selected from the novel FortressBesieged to analyze the characters’ personalities and their relationships by employingqualitative method.The analysis of the personality and relationship of characters in Fortress Besieged provesthat it is practicable and valid to apply conversation analysis to the conversations of novels.Integrating static approach of turn-taking mechanism with dynamic approach of discourse roles and pragmatic ambivalence turns out to be an explainable and persuasive method to theresearch of the literature texts. At the same time, it enriches the literature criticism byproviding a new perspective and offering a more objective method in the appreciation andanalysis of novels. From this way, it offers an example to other researchers and enlightens theway of a deeper and more integrated conversation analysis study of Fortress Besieged andother literature works.