Epstemic Primacy Of Second Assessment In Mandarin Chinese Daily Conversation

As a type of social action,assessment has a close relationship with epistemics,in which people manage the relations between self and others in access and rights to knowledge in interaction.A lot of epistemic studies on assessment haven been done overseas and most of these researches are conducted in languages as English,Japanese and German.Assessment has not received enough attention in linguistic studies in China yet,and there is still a blank concerning the studies of assessment from epistemic perspective in interactions conducted in Mandarin.In everyday communication,when interactants make assessments,they usually deliver their epistemic statuses and rights to the assessed referents through turn design.After a speaker makes the first assessment,as a response to it,the recipient routinely makes the second assessment which could be an agreement or a disagreement to the first assessment.An agreeing second assessment may contend for epistemic primacy with the prior speaker with the aid of different interactional practices.This thesis focuses on this subtle phenomenon to explore assessment in Mandarin from the perspective of epistemics.This research is conducted on the guidance of Conversation Analysis and adopts the theory of epistemics in particular.The data collected for this research all come from authentic daily conversations in Mandarin,including face-to-face talk,phone call and online chat.With an intensive analysis of data,some findings were obtained:(1)sequential positioning plays an important role in epistemic primacy claiming in assessment.First positioned assessments routinely claim epistemic primacy,while second assessments are inferior to them for the sake of position;(2)four typical practices in Chinese used in agreeing second assessment to claim epistemic primacy are drawn out from the collection of data:"Dui a/ya";"oh"-prefaced practice;"Shi ba?";negative interrogatives;(3)these four practices have different strength in claiming epistemic primacy;(4)people uses these practices to strike a balance between the personal want to show self uniqueness and the social norm of preference for alignment.The outcome of this research aims to explore the epistemic function in assessment design in Mandarin and offer some guidance for future studies on interactions in Mandarin.