Turn-Prefacing Interjection A(?)y(?)(哎呀)in Mandarin Daily Conversation: A Conversation Analytic Perspective

Interjections are pervasive in Mandarin daily conversation.Nonetheless,scholars are still in dispute over the classification of interjections and even debate whether they are words or not.Therefore,many scholars study interjections from the lexicological perspective,syntactic perspective and semantic perspective.In addition,scholars explore interjections from the pragmatic perspective,sociological perspective and conversation analytic perspective.However,compared with conversation analytic perspective,the studies from the pragmatic perspective and sociological perspective lack attention to the dynamic interaction.For scrutinizing the dynamic interaction,Conversation Analysis,taking naturally occurring interaction as the research object,is a unique and scientific methodology to study the social actions located in interaction and the order of social actions.Interjections often occur at the turn-initial position,which is essential to the turn design from the view of conversation analysis because the turn-prefacing tend to project what kind of action is under construction.Thus,interjections,frequently appearing at the turn-initial position,may forecast certain actions.Furthermore,some turn-prefacing interjections can foreshow the speakers’ “my side” perspectives,such as the speakers’ expectations,preference,knowledge or experience,etc.Based on the analysis of 300-minute daily Mandarin conversations,the turn-prefacing interjection “aīyā” functions as a “my side” alert.First,it can perform a role of “my side”alert for privileging the speakers’ own topical preference.In other words,the turn-initial“aīyā” indexes a shift from the current topic or serves as a signal to close the current topic or the whole conversation.Second,the turn-prefacing “aīyā” in responses to questions can be used as the speaker’s “my side” alert to foreshow the features of responses,in which the responses will be rejective,non-simple and non-straightforward and will take more than one TCU.Third,the “aīyā”-prefacing in responsive position can act as a “my side” alert to project the “my side” perspective of affiliation and disaffiliation.In most cases,the turnprefacing “aīyā” in responsive position forecasts the “my side” perspective of disaffiliation rather than the perspective of affiliation.To summarize,this thesis analyzes the turn-prefacing interjection “aīyā” in Chinese ordinary conversations from the perspective of conversation analysis,which is a useful supplement to the existing literature,such as linguistics,communication,and so on.Besides,this research contributes to participants’ understanding of the interactional practice and effectively instructs communicators’ interaction and provides insights into the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.