A Comparative Study Of Discourse-interactional Use Of Adverbial Conjunctions Of Certainty In Chinese And English

ACs of certainty are one kind of adverbial conjunctions and they are widely used in Chinese and English spoken discourses.And recently,scholars abroad and at home pay more and more attention to the analysis of interactional linguistics which focuses on spoken discourses.Scholars abroad put forward the theory and further develop it constantly and some Chinese scholars apply the theory to some researches.Inspired by these situations,we find that analyzing ACs of certainty from the perspective of interactional linguistics can cover the two new aspects and the thesis is an innovation.Adverbial conjunctions of certainty,such as“的确”,“确实”,“真的”in Chinese and certainly,actually,really in English and so on frequently appear in spoken discourses.Although many scholars have analyzed this kind of words and expressions from many diverse perspectives,the related researches of ACs of certainty from the perspective of interactional linguistics are rare.On the basis of some aspects of interactional linguistics,we make a comparative study of ACs of certainty on interactional functions from Chinese and English spoken discourses.Based on interactional linguistics,functional grammar and conversation analysis,we adopt corpus-based approach,qualitative and quantitative methods and comparative method and it first introduces the research background and research purposes,then discusses the related researches on adverbial conjunctions and interactional linguistics at home and abroad,and studies the relationship between the frequency of ACs of certainty and the interaction of spoken discourses and then the position of turns and the co-occurrences of ACs of certainty are analyzed carefully as well,aiming to sum up the interactive functions of the ACs of certainty in spoken discourses and the differences between Chinese and English.Besides these parts,the limitations of the current study and the further study are included as well.The thesis analyzes spoken discourses and chooses A Date with Luyu and CNN News---Interviews with Celebrities as corpora.These two talk shows are accepted widely and have almost the same properties,so they are authoritative and suitable.All analyses in the thesis are based on real conversations and the results based on them are more reliable and persuasive.The major findings are as follows.Firstly,the level of interaction of spoken discourse is positively related to the frequency of ACs of certainty.Secondly,ACs of certainty can appear in the initial position,middle position and final position of turns and their functions are to open turns,to keep turns and to transform turns respectively.Thirdly,ACs of certainty can cooccur and collocate with many kinds of words,such as another ACs of certainty,modal particles,conjunctions and other adverbial conjunctions.Last but not the least,when ACs of certainty are used in spoken discourses,they have the interactional functions of building online alignment,transferring the theme,filling pauses and keeping turns,strengthening and affirming information and judging information.