| Only a few linguists have shown their interest in oral academic Q&A sessions,which belong to part of academic lectures and conferences. Especially in China, fewresearchers have done research on this specific genre. However, this genre is of greatimportance for nearly every scholar, whose academic growth is involved withparticipating in academic lectures and conferences. Compared with the lecturesession and the presentation session, the Q&A session has its unique features, beinginteractive and spontaneous. The former means that participants can discuss andeven dispute with each other in a face-to-face way. The latter refers to the fact thatthere are less prepared but more spontaneous speeches from both the discussants andthe presenters.This thesis focuses on discussants’ texts in oral academic Q&A sessions.Pauline Webber’s (1997) categorization of different question types in Q&A sessionsis adopted. After categorizing the data collected through participative observation,this present study narrows down its scope to the most commonly asked questiontype, being the information eliciting questions. Analysis is undertaken from both themacro-and the micro-levels, with the aims of exploring the generic structure for thequestion type under study and investigating the strategic deployment of engagementresources by discussants.Through the macro-analysis of the generic structure for information elicitingquestions, it is found that in the GDUFS corpus discussants ask information elicitingquestions in a sandwich-like style with three layers consisted of eight elements,including gratitude for the presentation, address, compliment, intentionannouncement, contextualization, formulate the question, reformulate the question,and gratitude in advance. The first three elements form the upper layer, the middle four the middle layer, and the last one the lower layer. Among the three layers, onlythe middle one is obligatory, while the other two are optional. After a brief contrastwith Querol-Julián’s (2011) work concerning the same genre in the same field, thispresent study holds that culture seems to play an influencing factor in explaining thedifferences between the generic structure for the GDUFS corpus and that forQuerol-Julián’s (2011). In western scholars’ questions, there’s only one layer, whilein the Chinese discussants’ texts, two peripheral layers are found out. Besides,within the middle layer, western scholars skip the element of contextualization;while in their Chinese counterparts’ texts, this element is an obligatory one. We caninfer that when asking information eliciting questions, western scholars prefer adirect way, while the Chinese scholars tend to employ a circular style; and thatfacework is of greater importance in Chinese culture than in western culture.The micro-analysis of the engagement resources shows that the distributions ofeach engagement sub-systems are different, with Entertain the most widelyemployed one, and concur and distance the least frequently used ones. Thoughdistributed differently, all the engagement resources function to construct a dialogicspace between the discussants and the presenters or other putative addressees, andduring the process of either opening up or closing down the constructed dialogicspace interpersonal functions are achieved. In the sandwich-like generic structure forinformation eliciting questions, Engagement resources are inclined to accumulate inthe middle layer.Due to the fact that in China, up till now, few studies have investigated oralacademic Q&A sessions, this thesis intends to shed some light on this neglectedgenre. And the findings of this thesis are helpful not only to novice scholars’socialization into the specific community but also to their improvement of theacademic literacy (Lea&Street2000) in oral academic genre. |
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