A Conversation Analytic Study On Dual-questioning Turn In Mandarin Chinese

Information seeking is pervasive in ordinary conversation and in institutional interaction as well.When seeking information from co-participants,interactants mobilize a variety of practices that are deemed as appropriate or effective under each circumstance.Initiating repair,viz.affixing another question to the first one in the present study,is one of those frequently used practices.With this practice,the speaker can correct a factual error,i.e.an error that is opposite to the fact,in his/her talk.In most cases in our data,however,the interactant initiates a repair just to "fine-tune" his/her question which seems to be unproblematic.Based on a corpus of 74 telephone call recordings of daily Chinese Mandarin conversations,this study,from the conversation analysis perspective,analyzes the cases of two questions performing the action of information seeking within the same turn and the second one is a repair version of the first one.In addition,the subsequent response to the questioning turn is explicated in detail.Through the analysis of the interactional import generated by self-repair in the action of information seeking and its response design,this dissertation is aimed at revealing a tip of the iceberg of social organization reflected by everyday talk-in-interaction.After in-depth observation of data,five kinds of situations in which one question is added to another in the same turn is identified.These different situations reflect the orientation to recipient design of information-seekers in turn design.With the addition of the second question,questioners can construct information seeking in a more appropriate way based on the consideration of particular recipient and economy of interaction,guarantee the intersubjectivity between participants,attain the affiliation and maintain social solidarity as a whole.It is observable that the successful conduct of question-answer sequence—questioners seek the specified information and then recipients proffer the requested information—is an achievement under the coordination between questioners and respondents.This thesis analyzes the question-answer sequence in Chinese ordinary conversations from the perspective of conversation analysis,which is the supplement to the existing literature and offers some contrastive exploration research to that of English language.Besides,this study has such practical application as instructing communicators’ interaction to help achieve mutual understanding more effectively and providing enlightenment for language teaching,court interaction,doctor-patient interaction and so forth.