| Pivot constructions are frequently used in everyday talk-in-interaction.When engaged in concrete situated interactions,participants use pivot constructions to solve contingent problems and to meet interactional needs.In spite of the frequent appearance of pivot constructions in real-life conversations,little attention has ever been paid to them,not to mention the pivot constructions in Chinese contexts.In consideration of such absence,this study is intended to explore the nature and the practical use of pivot constructions in naturally occurring Chinese conversations.Pivot construction is a heterogenous phenomenon.It refers to a wide family of utterance constructions that share a common feature of having a central part.From a usage-based and communicative perspective,pivot construction is a kind of utterance construction method.It is used for accomplishing local communicative projects in ongoing talk(Noren,2007).Using the method of Conversation Analysis under the framework of dialogical linguistics and the Relevance Theory,a pragmatic study of Chinese pivot construction is conducted.By analyzing the corpus collected from Chinese real-life conversations,this study has yielded the following three results.Firstly,syntax and prosody are two important resources for constructing pivot utterances.Syntax has the functional potential of projecting a continuation at the end of the ongoing utterance.Prosody is used to integrate this continuation with the previous segment.Apart from being the constructing resources,the syntactic arrangement,prosodic features along with the local contextual environment operate as the identification criteria for pivot utterances.Secondly,despite the fact that the configurations of pivot constructions resemble that of Jianyu constructions and left-dislocation constructions in Chinese grammar,they are totally different constructions.The differences exist in the internal structures,generative mechanisms and essential attributes.Thirdly,in the actual use of pivot constructions,the realizations of the pragmatic functions are dependent on the concrete context of situation.In this study,four major pragmatic functions are summarized.In specific context,pivot constructions are expected to implement(1)the function of emphasizing;(2)the function of explaining;(3)the function of extending turns;(4)the function of shifting epistemic stances.The findings of the present study reveal that instead of breaching the nonnative grammatical regularities on the surface level,pivot constructions contrarily take syntax as one important resource for constructing utterances.Moreover,the fact that most speakers do not repair pivot utterances in natural conversations indicates the availability of pivot constructions and pivot utterances.Therefore,more in-depth studies need to be conducted on pivotal patterns in everyday talk-in-interaction. |
