Collaborative Construction of Turn Constructional Units in Mandarin Conversation

• Author / Creator

  Song, Zixuan

• In everyday conversation, two participants may collaboratively produce an utterance. Previous research has documented the syntactic structures and the interactional functions of collaboratively constructed turns/TCUs (CCTs) in languages such as English, Japanese and Finnish (Lerner, 1991, 1996; Hayashi, 2003, 2005; Helasvuo, 2004). However, there is no existing research on CCTs in Mandarin conversation. This study intends to fill this gap by exploring how two participants collaborative construct a turn, and what social actions are accomplished by the CCTs.
  Adopting the methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA), Interactional Linguistics (IL), and Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis, this study examines the social actions accomplished by CCTs and their syntactic structures. The data for this research are 11 hours of video and audio recorded naturalistic Mandarin conversation. An examination of the data shows that CCTs accomplish three main (sequences of) actions: assessment, informing, and question-answer sequence. When used to accomplish assessments, CCTs mainly serve as summative assessments that occur at the possible closure of extended sequences. When accomplishing informings, CCTs may be used to inform the recipients of past events, participants’ future plans, and participants’ affective stance. In question-answer sequences, CCTs may function as the answers to the questions. Also, participants may collaboratively construct a question-answer sequence. That is, the first speaker produces a syntactically incomplete turn as a question, and the second speaker answers the question by collaboratively completing the turn. The findings of this study contribute to our understanding of CCTs and turn sharing in Mandarin conversation.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • collaborative construction of turns
  • Conversation Analysis
  • Mandarin conversation
  • Interactional Linguistics

• Graduation date

  Spring 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-b9ms-2623

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.