Stance in Talk: A Conversation Analysis of Mandarin Final Particles (Pragmatics & Beyond New)

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Stance in Talk A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series Editor Andreas H. Jucker University of Zurich, English Department Plattenstrasse 47, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected]

Associate Editors Jacob L. Mey University of Southern Denmark

Herman Parret Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp

Jef Verschueren Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp

Editorial Board Shoshana Blum-Kulka Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni University of Lyon 2

Jean Caron Université de Poitiers

Claudia de Lemos University of Campinas, Brazil

Robyn Carston University College London

Marina Sbisà University of Trieste

Bruce Fraser Boston University

Emanuel Schegloff University of California at Los Angeles

Thorstein Fretheim University of Trondheim

Deborah Schiffrin Georgetown University

John Heritage University of California at Los Angeles

Paul O. Takahara Kansai Gaidai University

Susan Herring University of Texas at Arlington

Sandra Thompson University of California at Santa Barbara

Masako K. Hiraga St.Paul’s (Rikkyo) University

Teun A. Van Dijk Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

David Holdcroft University of Leeds

Richard J. Watts University of Berne

Sachiko Ide Japan Women’s University

Volume 117 Stance in Talk: A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles by Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu

Stance in Talk A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles

Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu San Diego State University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam/Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wu, Ruey-Jiuan Regina Stance in talk : a conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles / Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu. p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond, New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 117) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Chinese language--Particles. 2. Conversation analysis. I. Title: Stance in talk: A conversation analysis of Mandarin final particles. II. Title. III. Series. PL1237 W78 2003 495.1’16-dc22 isbn 90 272 5359 5 (Eur.) / 1 58811 453 8 (US) (Hb; alk. paper)

2003062593

© 2004 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Contents

For Mom, Ruey-hua, Chien-chung, and especially for you, Dad

v

vi

Contents

Contents vii

Contents Transcription conventions Glossing conventions Acknowledgements

xi xiii xv

Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Overview 1 1.2 An interactional approach to stance: conversation analysis and interactional linguistics 3 1.2.1 Lexical choice 4 1.2.2 Syntactic design 8 1.2.3 Prosodic manifestation 11 1.2.4 Sequential positioning 14 1.3 Interactional studies in Mandarin Chinese 20 1.4 Organization of the book 22 Chapter 2 Preliminaries and methodology 2.1 Context of the problem 25 2.2 Methodology and data 34 2.2.1 Conversation analysis 34 2.2.2 The data 38 2.2.3 Transcription conventions 40 2.2.4 Target forms: Wnal a and Wnal ou in TCU-Wnal position 42 2.3 Summary 47 Chapter 3 Final ou 3.1 Overview 49 3.2 Unmarked ou 51 3.2.1 Making conWrmation or disconWrmation relevant next 53

25

49

viii Contents

3.2.2

3.3

3.4

Final ou and the “conWrmation-as-relevant-next” import 63 3.2.3 Registering a news receipt 70 3.2.4 ConWrmation requests or news receipts? 79 3.2.5 Summary of unmarked ou 82 Marked ou: “There is more here than meets the eye!” 82 3.3.1 In Wrst position 85 3.3.2 In responsive position 97 3.3.3 Summary of marked ou 112 Marked ou versus unmarked ou: summary and discussion 113 3.4.1 Functional distribution of marked ou and unmarked ou 113 3.4.2 Sequential position, prosody, and imports of Wnal ou 114 3.4.3 Final ou as a linguistic resource for registering an epistemic alert 120

Chapter 4 Final a 127 4.1 Introduction 127 4.2 A with a notably low pitch 129 4.2.1 A-formulated questions 129 4.2.1.1 ConWrmation requests and pre-disagreements 129 4.2.1.2 Final a and invoking a contrast 138 4.2.2 A-attached questions 152 4.2.2.1 Marking the matter addressed by the question as problematic 153 4.2.2.2 Marking the very launching of the question as problematic 164 4.2.2.3 Final a and marking “problematicity” 172 4.2.3 Summary of a with a notably low pitch 178 4.3 A with a Xat or slightly high pitch 179 4.3.1 Informing 180 4.3.2 Disagreeing 201 4.3.3 Dealing with problems related to sequential contingency 214 4.3.4 Final a and marking “counter-valence” 222 4.4 Summary of Chapter 4 224

Contents

Chapter 5 Conclusion

233

References

241

Name index

253

Subject index

255

ix

x

Contents

Contents

Transcription conventions The transcription conventions used in this book follow those developed by JeVerson (1984), with some modiWcations. Overlapping talk [ A left bracket indicates the point at which a current speaker’s utterance is overlapped by the talk of another, which appears on the next line attributed to another speaker. If there is more than one left bracket in an utterance, then the second indicates where a second overlaps begins. Both the utterance which is overlapped and the utterance which overlaps are indicated by this symbol. [[ In cases where confusion may arise due to high frequency of overlaps among conversational coparticipants, a double left bracket will be used to resolve the possible confusion. Silence (0.5) Numbers in parentheses indicate silence, represented in tenths of a second. (.) A dot in parentheses indicates a Amicropause.@ Code-switching %oh% A pair of percentage signs indicates that the talk between them is produced in languages other than Mandarin, such as English or Taiwanese. Various aspects of speech delivery :: Colons are used to indicate the prolongation or stretching of the sound just preceding them. The more colons, the longer the stretching. __ Underlining is used to indicate some form of stress or emphasis. __: Combinations of underlining and colons are used to indicate intonation contours. A hyphen after a word or part of a word indicates a cut-oV or a selfinterruption.

xi

xii Transcription conventions

.hhh < > =

↑ ↓ °°

Hearable aspiration is shown where it occurs in the talk by the letter “h” C the more h’s, the more aspiration. A left-facing arrow marks the onset where a stretch of talk is markedly rushed or compressed. A right-facing arrow marks the onset where a stretch of talk is markedly slowed or drawn out. Equal signs are used to mark that (1) there is no interval between adjacent utterances by diVerent speakers, the second being latched immediately to the Wrst; (2) diVerent parts of a single speaker’s utterance constitute a continuous Xow of speech although they have been carried over to another line, by transcript design, to accommodate an intervening interruption. An upward-pointing arrow marks rising shifts in intonation. A downward-pointing arrow marks falling shifts in intonation. Double degree signs indicate that the talk between them is quieter than the surrounding talk.

Other notation () When all or part of an utterance is in parentheses, this indicates uncertainty on the transcriber’s part. → An arrow sign of this type speciWes the target of focus in the transcription. => An arrow sign of this type speciWes the primary target of focus in cases where an arrow sign has already been deployed to direct readers’ attention to some turn structure in facilitating the interpretation of some overall sequential contexts. (( )) A double parentheses are used to mark transcriber’s descriptions of events, such as ((cough)), ((sniV)) and ((telephone rings)).

Transcription conventions xiii

Glossing conventions ASP BA BEI CRS CSC C N PRT PRV Q 3sg

aspectual marker the ba marker in the ba construction the bei marker in the bei construction currently relevant state (le) complex stative construction classiWer negator particle perfective (-le) question marker third person singular pronoun

xiv Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments This book started out as a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles. As this study stands at the intersection of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and Chinese linguistics, I have included in this book a new chapter giving an overview of recent developments in these Welds, and have included discussions of several related recent studies which were either not available to me or had not come to my attention at the time when I Wnished my dissertation. Having completed this manuscript, I’d like to acknowledge with profound gratitude the many teachers, colleagues and friends who have inspired or supported me on this long journey. First, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Emanuel SchegloV and Sandra Thompson. It has been a great privilege to learn Wrst-hand from Emanuel SchegloV what doing conversation analysis is all about. I thank Manny for introducing me to conversation analysis, for sharing with me his insights, and for instilling in me the truth-Wnding spirit. As the old saying goes, AGive a man a Wsh, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to Wsh, and he eats for a lifetime.@ I would like to thank Manny for teaching me to Wsh. I am tremendously indebted and grateful to Sandra Thompson for her support and guidance during C and beyond C the dissertation stage. Sandy has shared with me her extensive knowledge of linguistics and Chinese linguistics, and has helped me communicate to audiences in both scholarly communities. I thank Sandy for reading several earlier versions of the current work, and for her invaluable comments and discussions. Her exemplary scholarship and mentorship will always remain with me as a great source of inspiration. My sincere thanks goes to Charles Goodwin for going out of his way to respond to my inquiries and for his very insightful comments and suggestions. A special word of thanks also to Marianne Celce-Murcia and John Heritage for their long-term support and encouragement. I also wish to acknowledge a debt to many friends and colleagues who have provided helpful input: Wayne Beach, Steven Clayman, Margaret Field, JeVrey Kaplan, Irene Koshik, Glen McClish, Deborah Poole, Betty Samraj, and Ruey-hua Wu. My special thanks to Tim McDaniel for his editorial support; he is the kind of friend that people only dream about.

xv

xvi Acknowledgements

This project was partially supported by a fellowship from UCLA and a micro-grant from the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University, for which I am grateful. I would also like to extend my gratitude to my colleagues C and many good friends C at the Department of Linguistics and Oriental Languages at San Diego State University for their support over the years, and to the participants in my data for generously sharing with me a slice of their lives. Of course, I am the person who is solely responsible for all remaining shortcomings. Finally, I wish to express my special thanks to my mother, sister, brother and especially my late father, who have been behind me at every step of the way, and to whom I owe more than words could express. Their love has made the completion of this book possible and meaningful. And it is to them that I gratefully dedicate this book.

Introduction

Chapter 1

Introduction

1.1

Overview

In everyday conversation, people engage in various kinds of activities: They ask and answer questions, they agree and disagree with each other, and they tell stories and provide feedback when listening to stories, for example. If we look at these activities closely, it soon becomes clear that parties to conversation do not merely accomplish these activities, but almost always accomplish them with a stance. For example, they may ask or answer questions with diVerent degrees of epistemic strength or with various kinds of implications, they may choose to issue a disagreement straightforwardly or in a mitigated fashion, they may agree with their interlocutors with or without asserting a higher epistemic status over their interlocutors, or they may report a piece of news while at the same time displaying diVerent degrees of commitment to its validity or tellability. It is by now well-recognized that language typically provides a repertoire of devices for conveying this wide array of stance in talk-in-interaction, and that, while the notion of stance and even knowledge of its existence elude many, most speakers of a language seem to have an intuitive sense of their use. Indeed, as previous conversation analytic research has shown (see, for example, Drew and Heritage 1992 for a review of this topic), a crucial feature of turn design, apart from the selection of the activity to be accomplished, concerns the selection of how an activity is to be realized. And in selecting among alternative ways of performing an activity, speakers can indicate, or can be heard to indicate, how they know about, are commenting on, or are taking an aVective or other position toward the person or matter being addressed. In other words, they can embody, or be heard to embody, their stance. Guided by the theoretical and methodological principles of conversation analysis (CA), this book takes as its central question how participants in Mandarin conversation employ, or otherwise exploit, linguistic resources to

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Final particles in Mandarin

display stance in the unfolding development of action and interaction, and, in particular, how this is accomplished through the use of two Mandarin Wnal particles, a and ou. I have selected Wnal particles as the key objects of my study in part because they are integral in conveying emotive and epistemic nuances on the part of the speaker, even though they do not have referential meanings. Also, this selection was motivated by a dual methodological goal: On the one hand, the research presented in this book seeks to demonstrate how a participant-oriented, action-based micro approach to data as informed by CA can help us gain analytic leverage in exploring the functions and meanings of these particles C an area which has long posed a challenge to Chinese linguists. On the other hand, in utilizing a CA-based framework applied to Mandarin Chinese, this study also seeks to contribute to conversation analytic research by revealing previously uninvestigated language-speciWc phenomena while at the same time showing how talk-in-interaction in a non-western language, i.e., Mandarin Chinese, can also display the same striking systematicity and orderliness as observed in many western languages. At a more global level, this study also builds on the Weld of “interactional linguistics,” which takes situated language use as the primary locus of investigation, and which seeks to explore the mutual bearing of various organizations of language, such as prosody, lexicon, and linguistic structures, and various organizations of interaction, such as turn construction, turn-taking, conversational repair practices, participation frameworks, and collaborative completions (e.g., Ochs, SchegloV and Thompson 1996; Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 1996; Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2001; and Ford, Fox and Thompson 2002, inter alia). The present study, then, shares, and attempts to advocate, the view held by researchers in this Weld, that if we take seriously the claim that language is part of a broader range of systems which underlie the organization of social life and human conduct, then the study of language should be situated in the social/interactional matrix, and should incorporate attention to how language Wgures in the processes of meaning making and meaning negotiations in the evolving actions in talk-in-interaction. This view is clearly expressed in the following quote from SchegloV (1996c:5), where he calls for a consideration of re-framing the object of attention in linguistic analysis, especially stating that in the analysis of discourse: It is critical that the analysis of discourse incorporate attention not only to the propositional content and information distribution of discourse units, but also to the actions they are doing. Especially (but not exclusively) in conversation,

Introduction

talk is constructed and is attended by its recipients for the action or actions which it may be doing. Even if we consider only declarative-type utterances, because there is no limit to the utterables which can be informative and/or true, the informativeness or truth of an utterance is, by itself, no warrant or grounds for having uttered it C or for having uttered it at a particular juncture in an occasion. There is virtually always an issue (for the participants, and accordingly for professional analysts) of what is getting done by its production in some particular here-and-now.

The present study provides an empirically-grounded micro-analysis of two Wnal particles, a and ou, in Mandarin Chinese conversations. Since this study stands at the intersection of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics and Chinese linguistics, a brief overview of the current developments of these Welds is in order.

1.2

An interactional approach to stance: conversation analysis and interactional linguistics

For the purpose of the present study, “stance” is referred to as a speaker’s indication of how he or she knows about, is commenting on, or is taking an aVective or other position toward the person or matter being addressed.1 Although “stance” is not a term commonly used in CA literature, a growing body of research, done within CA or informed by it, has dealt with various aspects of stance, as it is deWned here. This body of work diverges from other studies of stance (e.g., Biber and Finegan 1988, 1989; Field 1997) whose main focus has been on the linguistic realization of stance, primarily through the identiWcation of linguistic stance markers. Unlike those studies, the body of work in which the current study is located focuses on how stance can be accomplished interactionally through the use of linguistic resources or other practices. Thus, a distinctive feature of this research is that while it shares an interest in trying to identify linguistic resources on which participants rely in embodying stance, it does not treat stance as the product of an individual’s performance accomplished through one-way linguistic mappings, i.e., mappings of certain linguistic forms onto the stance he or she wishes to put forward. Instead, like all other actions, stance is treated as an emergent product which is shaped by, and itself shapes, the unfolding development of interaction. And in this process, linguistic resources or other practices not only can play a

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constitutive role in contributing to making the sense of the stance visible; these resources or practices also can be used reXexively C reXexively embodying the sense of the stance commonly associated with their uses and thereby “maintaining or altering the sense of the activities and unfolding circumstances in which they occur” (Heritage 1984a:140). A rich ground for the investigation of such interactional accomplishments of stance is turn design, which, as Drew and Heritage (1992:32) have noted, involves the selection of both the activity to be performed in a turn at talk and the speciWc ways in which this activity is to be accomplished. In this section, I outline four major areas of turn design which have been foci of interactional studies of stance, and which bear most directly on the present study. These areas are: (a) lexical choice; (b) syntactic design; (c) prosodic manifestation; and (d) sequential positioning.2 In what follows, I will provide a selective survey of recent Wndings in each of these areas. In keeping with the emphasis on turn design in the present study, however, I will discuss Wndings drawn primarily from research relating stance to turn organization, especially that within the CA paradigm. To the extent that this body of work also contributes to our understanding of the relationship between situated linguistic practices and situated human conduct C such as, for example, the embodiment of stance, this work can also be seen as an extension of the growing body of research in the budding Weld of interactional linguistics.

1.2.1 Lexical choice The relevance of lexical choice to the embodiment of stance is well documented. In their extensive research into styles of stance in English, for example, Biber and Finegan (1988, 1989) identify twelve categories of adjectival, verbal and modal markers of stance. Using sophisticated statistical analyses, they demonstrate how the use of these stance markers can be strongly associated with various stance types in English. However, while Biber and Finegan focus only on the textual relationships between stance markers and styles of stance, a number of more recent studies have begun to pay closer attention to the interactive basis for the use of stance markers. He (1993), for instance, looks at modal choices by academic counselors and their student clients in academic counseling encounters and demonstrates how the counselors and students can employ modality of diVerent values to mark diVerent stances when performing diVerent institutional tasks. In a similar vein, Fox (2001)

Introduction

explores the situated uses of evidential marking C i.e., the linguistic encoding of the speaker’s source of knowledge for a statement (e.g., hear, see, must, seem, apparently, evidently) C in English conversation. By looking at diVerential evidential marking for the same statement on diVerent occasions, and by looking at speakers’ choices of the use or non-use of evidential marking in contexts where both are available, she argues that evidential marking is sensitive to the relationship between speaker and recipient, and that its use may embody the speaker’s stance as alternating between distancing him or herself from, or claiming a greater responsibility for, the statement being made. The relevance of lexical choice to the embodiment of stance is not limited to the use of stance markers, however. C. Goodwin (1986), for example, demonstrates how, through word selection of terms imparting a sense of violent conXict (e.g., takes his helmet oV and clunks it; screamed his damn engine) or from domains such as profanity (e.g., god damn iron bar; throw that son of a bitch down; rapped him a good one in the ass), the speaker can not only embody a recognizable male perspective on the event being recounted, but can also propose a particular alignment to that event. Fox (1987) and SchegloV (1996d) both oVer evidence that the use of a “locally initial” reference form (e.g., a name such as Keegan) in a “locally subsequent” sequential environment is one way of embodying a disaligning stance. The linkage between word selection and stance display has also been documented in a number of studies examining language and social interaction in institutional settings. For example, Whalen and Zimmerman (1990) demonstrate how the use of the lexical formulation “we have” in citizen calls to the police can Wgure in what the researchers call “practical epistemology” C namely, how one has come to know about this particular event on this occasion. They argue that in selecting “we have” in formulating troublesome occurrences to the police (e.g., we have an unconscious diabetic), the caller commonly embodies C and is heard to embody C the stance that the caller is representative of some establishment, doing what a person in this social position is expected C and entitled C to do. Bergmann (1992), as well, discusses the use of various lexical formulations in psychiatric intake interviews. In particular, he provides a sustained discussion of “litotes” C a rhetorical device which describes the matter being addressed through the negation of the opposite, rather than in a straightforward manner (e.g., I just got the information that you’re not doing so well, rather than I just got the information that you’re doing badly.) He concludes that the use of litotes in these psychiatric encounters can serve, among other things, to dis-

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play a stance of professional cautiousness and defensiveness on the part of a psychiatrist. Yet another productive line of research relating lexical choice to the embodiment of stance is a group of studies investigating various linguistic forms, such as “discourse markers” (e.g., SchiVrin 1987; Ford 1993; Jucker and Ziv 1998; Park 1997, 1998; Mori 1999), modal adverbs (e.g., Maynard 1993) and Wnal particles (e.g., Luke 1990; Cook 1992, 1997). Several scholars (e.g., SchiVrin 1987; Maynard 1993; Park 1997, 1998), for example, have pointed to the strong connection between the use of contrastive markers such as but and their equivalents in other languages and the display of a disaligning stance. Mori (1999) provides an extensive analysis of the use of a set of Japanese connective expressions (i.e., datte, dakara, kara, demo and kedo) in three distinct contexts: delivery of agreement, delivery of disagreement and pursuit of agreement. She demonstrates that the selection of one connective expression over another in these environments can embody a very diVerent evaluative stance; for example, while some connective expressions (e.g., datte and demo) are commonly associated with the speaker’s display of a strong assertive stance toward the matter being addressed, others (e.g., kara and kedo) serve to mitigate the disaYliative force and merely allude to an unstated partial disagreement. A number of studies have also explored how Wnal particles Wgure in the process of embodying stance. Cook (1992:519), for example, suggests that the main function of the Japanese Wnal particle ne is as an “aVect speciWer,” serving to index “aVective common ground” among the interlocutors. Luke’s (1990) work on Cantonese Wnal particles shows that the selection of these Wnal particles can be contingent on the speaker’s epistemic stance, and, in particular, on whether or not the speaker treats the event being discussed as newsworthy. In addition to the use of connective and Wnal particles, many studies have documented how the selection of one response token over another can be seen as embodying the speaker’s display of a particular stance toward the talk being responded to. Such a stance display may be related to that of continuing recipientship, or the lack thereof, on the part of the particle user. For example, in proposing the central usage of uh huh as “continuers,” SchegloV (1982:81) argues that the production of uh huh embodies not merely a claim of “I understand the state of the talk,” nor the understanding that an extended unit of talk by another is currently underway. Its use rather embodies the stance that the speaker of that extended unit “should continue talking, and in that

Introduction

continued talking should continue that extended unit.” JeVerson (1993) and Drummond and Hopper (1993) have also looked at the choice of response tokens and its implications for listener stance. Both studies oVer evidence that the use of uh huh generally exhibits projected continuing recipientship on the part of its producer, whereas yeah or yes commonly embodies an incipient move to assume speakership and/or to shift topic. Along similar lines, in his study based primarily on Australian English data, Gardner (2001) registers a strong association between the use of the response token mm and a move by its producer to launch a topic other than that which is otherwise in progress. He suggests that the use of mm C as compared to other tokens such as yeah and mm hm C displays low involvement in the current talk on the part of the speaker. Although response tokens can be used to embody stances related to recipientship as discussed above, recipientship is not the only stance that can be embodied through the use of response tokens. Many studies, for example, have documented the capability of response tokens to display epistemic stance. An important study in this regard is Heritage’s (1984b) study of the English oh. He points out that a major diVerence between the “change-of-state token” oh and other response tokens such as yes pertains to the knowledge state of its producer vis-à-vis the matter under discussion. To support this observation, he oVers evidence that while oh serves mainly to propose the talk to which it responds as informative to the particle speaker, response tokens such as yes avoid just such a treatment and are regularly associated with additional turn components that assert prior knowledge of just delivered information. In a subsequent study, Heritage (2002a) analyzes oh-prefaced responses to assessments in the contexts of agreements and disagreements. He argues that the baseline claim conveyed in an oh-prefaced agreement or disagreement is one of “epistemic independence,” and that such a claim of epistemic independence is often associated with C and reXexively embodies C a display of epistemic authority on the part of the oh speaker over his or her interlocutor. A similar connection between the use of response particles and epistemic stance has also been noted by Sorjonen (2001) in her work on Finnish response particles. She shows, for instance, that a salient feature of the Finnish particle niin is a display that its speaker has in some way prior access to what another has just said in a previous turn.

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In addition to epistemic stance, a clear aVective component in the use of some response tokens has been documented in a number of studies. For example, in exploring the use of the English no in response to negativelyframed utterances, JeVerson (1996, 2002) makes a distinction between aYliative and non-aYliative responses. She argues that in contrast to acknowledgment tokens which do not aYliate but merely indicate “I understand what you said,” aYliative responses such as no can be heard to display stances such as, “I feel the same way,” “I’d do the same thing,” and “I am with you.” A similar distinction is observed by Sorjonen (2001) in her Finnish data. She shows that a major axis relevant for the division of labor between the two particles she examines (i.e., niin and joo) is the aVective stance(s) they express: While niin commonly conveys a sense of “I agree with you; I see your point; I’m on your side,” the use of joo merely registers the factual character of the prior utterance and can, by implication, be understood as conveying a stance of disaYliation. Related to the notion of aVect and of special relevance to the present study is Heritage’s (1998) study of the English particle oh. In this study, he points to a particular kind of disaligning stance commonly associated with the practice of oh-prefacing. SpeciWcally, he shows how the English oh, when used as a preface to turns in response to questions, can serve to problematize and challenge the relevance, appropriateness or presuppositions of the question to which it responds. Heritage’s (1998, 2002a) Wndings regarding the practice of oh-prefacing in English conversation reXect an interesting parallel between the usage of oh-prefacing in English and that of the Wnal particle a in Mandarin Chinese: Both are used to mark the stance that the matter being addressed is “inapposite” in some way from the particle speaker’s point of view, and both assert the primacy of the speaker’s perspective. This function of Mandarin a will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4.

1.2.2 Syntactic design Although lexical choice is arguably one of the principle carriers of stance C and perhaps the most salient of the carriers C other sources of stance marking have also been discussed in the literature. In fact, that the embodiment of stance may also be accomplished through syntactic design has Wgured as a primary focus in a growing body of literature. A number of studies, for example, have pointed to a strong association between word order and the display of a speaker’s aVective stance. A clear illustration is Kim’s (1995) work

Introduction

on English WH-clefts and left dislocation. Through an in-depth sequential analysis of the use of these two constructions in English conversation, he suggests that one common usage of these two constructions is to embody the speaker’s counteractive stance toward the preceding talk. Similar observations have been noted in Ono and Suzuki’s (1992) discussion on the emotively motivated post-predicate constituents in Japanese, and in Guo’s (1999) work on right-dislocation in Mandarin Chinese: Both constructions are shown to serve the function of conveying the intensity of the speaker’s negative aVect. Another fruitful line of research in recent studies of stance and syntactic turn construction has dealt with question design. Many studies in this area have demonstrated how aspects of question design can have a strong and direct bearing on the stance being instantiated. For example, drawing on data from broadcast news interviews, Heritage (2002b) investigates the use of negatively-framed questions (e.g., won’t you have to consider threatening to vote against the government?) and that of negative tags (e.g., you’ll have to consider threatening to vote against the government, won’t you?) by interviewers. He oVers evidence that while negatively-framed questions are frequently produced as, and treated as, a vehicle for asserting a position or an opinion, negative tags are not. He argues, therefore, that these two types of questions embody diVerent degrees of assertiveness relative to the matter under discussion on the parts of interviewers. Koshik (2002) investigates another type of yes/no question, which she calls a “reversed polarity question” (RPQ). Unlike Heritage (2002b), the yes/ no questions she analyzes are aYrmatively-constructed (e.g., didja tell me that?). She shows that these aYrmative yes/no questions, when used by teachers in one-on-one writing conferences to show why a portion of student text is problematic, prefer “no” answers because they convey negative assertions (e.g., didja tell me that in eVect conveying the stance, “you didn’t tell me, in your text, what you just said orally, but you should have.”) She suggests that the negative stance instantiated through RPQs comes from a complex interplay of the design of the question, the actions which the questions are used to perform, and the displayed knowledge state or epistemic strength from which the questions are asked. While the studies by Heritage and Koshik both focus on yes/no questions, yes/no questions are by no means the only question type that can embody speaker stance. For example, in analyzing the questions that journalists ask of public Wgures in broadcast news interviews and press conferences, Clayman

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and Heritage (2002) identify four facets of adversarialness manifest in journalists’ questions. They demonstrate that aspects of question design, such as the ways in which questions are prefaced, framed, and followed up on, all have a direct impact on the degree of adversarialness embodied in and through the use of these questions. In a related study, Clayman (1992) focuses attention on the design of question prefaces in television news interviews. He demonstrates how by shifting “footings” (GoVman 1981) C and attributing otherwise contentious claims or positions to a third party or an unnamed source (e.g., it’s said that his [President Reagan’s] programs are in trouble) C interviewers can avoid asserting such positions on their own behalf, and in eVect maintain a neutralistic stance in interaction with their guests. In a number of recent studies of news broadcasts, question design is further linked to issues such as “social epistemology” (Roth 2002) and social relationships of participants. These studies show how participants in news broadcasts, in and through their selection and non-selection of certain question types, can convey their stance with regard to who has direct or privileged access to the matter under discussion versus who is linked to the matter in a more attenuated fashion. For example, in his work on live news broadcasts, Raymond (2000) shows that reporters and anchors consistently diVer in their selections from a range of practices during the live coverage of unfolding events: While anchors overwhelmingly restrict themselves to initiating reportage about events through question-driven sequences of talk, reporters overwhelmingly launch reportage by initiating a telling. Raymond argues that the consistent selection of diVerent practices by reporters and anchors can be seen as an embodiment of the complementary stances that anchors and reporters take up toward their role-based identities: that is, relative to the anchors, reporters are cast as authorities who have superior knowledge of, and privileged access to, the events under coverage. Roth (2002) also explores how aspects of question design can instantiate interviewers’ and interviewees’ stances in relation to a social distribution of knowledge in broadcast news interviews. SpeciWcally, he demonstrates how such stances are embodied through the use of two types of questions: “direct questions” (e.g., Will you be marching tomorrow?) and “epistemic-framed questions” (e.g., Do you think he’s gonna endorse you?). He argues that while direct questions typically align interviewees as “subject-actors,” depicting their answers as involving correct or established facts, epistemic-framed questions typically align interviewees as “commentators,” depicting their answers as involving merely second-hand, or

Introduction

less than certain, knowledge of the matter in question. He concludes that these aspects of question design inXuence how parties in news interviews negotiate interviewees’ rights and obligations to “know about, comment on, and account for” newsworthy matters or events (Roth 2002:356). Across these studies, it has been established that syntactic design, such as word order or question design, provides a resource through which participants in talk-in-interaction can convey various stances. In addition, many of these studies (e.g., Clayman 1992; Raymond 2000; Roth 2002) have further demonstrated how such formal aspects of turn design, in addition to their capability to embody stance, can work reXexively to constitute it as well. These themes will resurface in our discussion of the two Mandarin Wnal particles a and ou, both of which can be used to construct questions, and both of which mark the questions so constructed with diVerent epistemic and aVective stances.

1.2.3 Prosodic manifestation Although the relationship between prosody and the display of stance has long been recognized, it is only recently that this relationship C and how it enters into situated conversation C has been subjected to rigorous empirical investigation. Drawing on the tradition of conversation analysis and the recentlyadvocated interactional approach to prosody (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 1996), various scholars have begun to document, for example, how prosody may Wgure in a speaker’s stance display in the unfolding course of interaction, and how such prosodically-embodied stance may, in turn, be so oriented to by its recipient(s). In this body of literature, some studies have explored how prosody may embody the speaker’s knowledge state relative to the matter under discussion vis-à-vis his or her interlocutor(s). A clear illustration is Local’s (1996) work on the English particle oh, in which he Wnds, among other things, that freestanding oh-tokens commonly exhibit diVerent phonetic characteristics depending on whether the information to which they respond is initiated by the news-bearer or is elicited by the oh speaker. In the former, the particle oh is typically realized as a diphthong with falling pitch, whereas in the latter, the oh tokens are typically monophthongal. A second area of research on the ways in which prosody can serve as a resource for local displays of interactional stance has to do with the notion of

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speaker incipiency. For example, Gardner (1997, 2001), in his work on response tokens, points to a particular diVerence between mm produced with a falling terminal contour and mm produced with a falling-rising contour: While the former serves mainly to claim agreement or understanding, the latter is used primarily to return the Xoor to the prior speaker. A similar observation is noted by Sorjonen (2001) in her investigation of the Finnish particle niin. She shows that the niin tokens which serve as continuers tend to be produced with a non-falling terminal contour, whereas those used to claim recognition are typically produced with a falling terminal contour or with two peaks. The main body of work investigating the relationship between prosody and stance, however, has focused on how prosody is related to the displaying of “aVect.”3 For example, in studying conversational news deliveries, Freese and Maynard (1998) show that participants almost always ascribe valence C or an evaluative stance C to the news being delivered, and that in this process, prosodic and lexical devices are frequently used in conjunction in achieving this end. Likewise, in a study investigating riddle-guessing activities in a British phone-in program, Couper-Kuhlen (1996) shows how the speciWc prosodic make-up of the hosts’ repetitions of their callers’ prior talk can be linked to various stance displays. SpeciWcally, she argues that when the program hosts use an absolute register matching, rather than a relative register matching, to repeat a caller’s talk C that is, when the hosts mimic not only the words but also the pitch of the caller C they are commonly heard to launch a veiled criticism of the caller or his or her manner of speaking. Similar observations about the linkage between prosody and aVect display are documented in a number of studies using German data. For example, by comparing two types of repair initiations that are similar in all aspects except for their prosody, Selting (1996) demonstrates that in contrast to their prosodically unmarked counterparts, repair initiations produced with a marked prosody are regularly interpreted as carrying with them an emotive overtone of “astonishment.” In the same vein, Günthner’s (1996) investigation of a group of “genuine” whyquestions and why-questions which are produced as a vehicle for reproach in her data reveals that the reproach-implicated why-questions are commonly produced with an array of prosodic features which are not present in the genuine why-questions. She suggests that these prosodic features, combined with other co-occurring syntactic and lexico-semantic cues, serve to direct the

Introduction

recipient’s attention to the negative stance that the questioner is taking up toward the matter at issue. In addition to the aVective stances embodied in syntactic constructions such as questions or repairs, many studies have documented how prosody can also be used in conjunction with nonlexicalized response tokens or emotional cries of various sorts to convey aVective stance. A series of studies by the Goodwins (e.g., M. Goodwin 1998; C. Goodwin 2000; M. Goodwin and C. Goodwin 2000; M. Goodwin, C. Goodwin and Yaeger-Dror 2002), for example, have shown that during children’s play, both AfricanAmerican and bilingual Spanish/English children are commonly observed to preface their opposing turns with “response cries” (GoVman 1978, 1981) (e.g., Ah, Ay, Eh, Oh, Uh, Oo) or cries of “OUT!” or “NO!”, and that in producing these cries, they also make use of pitch leaps, vowel lengthening and dramatic contours to vocally highlight their opposing stance. Similarly, Müller (1996) Wnds two types of acknowledgement tokens in his Italian radio data, one signaling aYliation and the other disaYliation, and he suggests that the prosodic compositions of these tokens C especially their intonational and rhythmic Wts to the prior talk C play a crucial role in determining whether a particular acknowledgement token is used to embody a stance of aYliation or disaYliation. The power of prosody to embody aVective stance has also been discussed in M. Goodwin and C. Goodwin’s (2000) work on the use of language by a man with aphasia, in which they show how by overlaying his limited repertoire of words with a range of diVerent intonation contours, this aphasic man, who can otherwise speak only four words Yes, No, And and Oh, is able to make visible a range of diVerentiated evaluative stances toward the events in progress. Taken together, the studies reviewed thus far reXect a recent endeavor to integrate prosodic research with sequential analyses of conversation. These studies not only demonstrate how prosody is pivotal in conveying or constituting stance, but, more importantly, also seek to empirically ground, in participants’ conduct, their observations about the relationship between stance and prosody. One consequence of undertaking such an interactional approach to prosody is that it can yield new results which at times are at variance with claims based on analysts’ intuitions. For example, as M. Goodwin and C. Goodwin’s (2000) detailed examination of the interactional behavior of an aphasic man informs us, despite commonsense intuitions to the contrary, an explicit emotion vocabulary is not necessary for powerful dis-

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plays of emotions; rather, through the integration of intonation, body behavior and timing, this aphasic man is able to make visible and Wnely place a range of stances he is taking toward the events in progress. Likewise, the studies by Gardner (2001) and Sorjonen (2001) demonstrate that it is only through detailed sequential and prosodic analyses of response tokens that this previously undiVerentiated class of expressions is found to exhibit a Wne-tuned division of labor in embodying stance. The insights and the body of Wndings oVered by the interactional approach to prosody discussed above have a special relevance for our investigations of the Mandarin Wnal particles a and ou. As will be seen in Chapters 3 and 4, although Wnal particles have been claimed to be inherently toneless, unstressed and lacking deWnite intonation contours (e.g., Chao 1968; Li and Thompson 1981), prosodic features are nonetheless found to be crucial to their intrinsic meanings and to the interactional stances they embody.

1.2.4 Sequential positioning In the previous sections, I discussed a new generation of studies which, in various ways, has brought our attention to the roles that diVerent facets of turn design, such as its lexical, syntactic or prosodic features, have in embodying a speaker’s stance. Important as these Wndings are, however, we should keep in mind that just like other actions, the displaying of a stance is an interactional phenomenon that is bound up in the organization of turns and sequences. Thus, what renders a particular stance visible on any given occasion is not the verbal construction of a turn alone, but rather its juxtaposition to the sequential location in which it is produced. This, in fact, is a premise which underlies most of the studies discussed earlier, and a theme which has been explicitly addressed in many of these studies (e.g., SchegloV 1982; Couper-Kuhlen 1996; Günthner 1996; Local 1996; Müller 1996; Freese and Maynard 1998; M. Goodwin 1998; Heritage 1998; C. Goodwin 2000; M. Goodwin and C. Goodwin 2000; Fox 2001; Gardner 2001; Sorjonen 2001; M. Goodwin, C. Goodwin and Yaeger-Dror 2002; Heritage 2002a, 2002b; Koshik 2002). For example, in proposing the central usage of uh huh as a “continuer,” SchegloV (1982, 1993) emphasizes that the status of uh huh as a continuer or as a signal of attention is contingent in part on its sequential placement; when uh huh is produced in other than the midst of another’s extended turn, as in response to a yes/no question or after talk

Introduction

that is intendedly complete, diVerent interactional stances, such as claiming an agreement or signaling a display of inattention, may present themselves. Similar observations about the impact of sequential positioning on response tokens have been noted in Gardner (2001) and Sorjonen (2001) as well. Both stress that the speciWc functions of the response tokens they examine are intimately tied to the sequential placements of the talk to which these tokens respond. Along similar lines, Koshik (2002) argues that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the design of a question and its interpretation as either a reversed polarity question or a “real” question. She suggests that such interpretations rest instead on the actions performed by the questions, their sequential positioning, and the knowledge states of the participants. Similarly, Fox (2001) claims that the selection from among alternative evidential markers can be responsive to the sequential location in which the evidential marker is produced. She supports this claim by demonstrating how the use of an overt evidential marker by a non-addressed recipient to voluntarily address an arguably delicate matter can be seen as motivated by the interactional contingencies associated with this particular sequential context. The importance of sequential positioning has also been noted in many of the prosodic studies discussed earlier. A number of scholars (e.g., Günthner 1996; Local 1996; Freese and Maynard 1998; M. Goodwin 1998; C. Goodwin 2000; M. Goodwin and C. Goodwin 2000; Gardner 2001; Sorjonen 2001; M. Goodwin, C. Goodwin and Yaeger-Dror 2002) have maintained that the prosodic parameters identiWed as relevant for their studies are intimately intertwined with other parameters such as lexis, syntax and sequential positioning. Local (1996), in particular, warns against assigning “meaning” directly to pitch contours without considering the sequential environments of their occurrences. This view is echoed by Freese and Maynard (1998:199) in their work on the prosodic features of news deliveries, in which they argue: [P]rosodic devices are highly multi-functional and achieve their signiWcance through an interaction with lexical, sequential and situational information. One can, therefore, never claim a deterministic relationship between prosody and meaning, but rather can only note the utility of particular prosodic structures when employed in particular sequential environments.

While the main concern about sequential positioning in the majority of the body of literature discussed above is its role in delimiting or making sense of the range of stances associated with particular kinds of turn designs, other studies take as their central theme the notion that the sequential placement of

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a linguistic practice is as much a part of its character as the other design features. One of these studies is SchegloV’s (1996a) work on repeats.4 Instead of treating all instances of repeats as the same class of interactional phenomena, SchegloV starts by laying out three types of sequential position that repeats can potentially occupy: (i) Repeats can occur in sequentially-initial position, serving, for example, to initiate a repair sequence; (ii) repeats can occur in sequentially-second position, serving, for example, as answers to questions; and (iii) repeats can occur in sequentially-third position, where they may be used to receive or register responses. Focusing on instances in which repeats are produced in a second or third position and also on instances in which repeats are produced by recipients of the Wrst saying to do agreement or conWrmation, SchegloV goes on to demonstrate that these repeats serve not only to conWrm the sense of the Wrst saying, but to conWrm as well that what is being conWrmed had previously been “alluded to” by the conWrming party C the repeat speaker C in the preceding talk. In choosing to agree with another by repeating what they have just said, then, the speaker in eVect embodies a diVerent epistemic stance than that which would otherwise be conveyed through other practices. Such a conWrmatory repeat embodies not only a stance of alignment, but also the speaker’s prior orientation and access to the matter under discussion. SchegloV argues that the practice of conWrming repeats plays a key role in the process of negotiating “who is agreeing with whom,” and its strategic use and non-use can additionally serve to convey a range of aVective stances C such as satisfaction, mockery, self-defense, and the like C toward the other and toward the matters being addressed in the talk. Another major work exploring the bearing of sequential position on the relationship between linguistic form and stance displays is Heritage and Raymond’s (2003) work on “the terms of agreement” C i.e., the management of rights and responsibilities regarding the matter of “who is agreeing with whom.” Focusing on sequences in which participants oVer evaluative assessments of states of aVairs, Heritage and Raymond argue that diVerential rights to assess referent states of aVairs are tacitly encoded in the sequential ordering of the assessments. SpeciWcally, oVering an assessment in Wrst position C as opposed to second position C commonly carries an implied claim that the speaker has primary epistemic rights to assess the matter being evaluated. As a result, persons oVering Wrst assessments may wish to cancel the implication that they are claiming epistemic authority in the matter under discussion; and conversely, persons who Wnd themselves producing responsive assessments

Introduction

may work to defeat the implication that they have only secondary access to the matter being assessed relative to the Wrst speaker. Heritage and Raymond demonstrate that in managing such a relationship between assessing rights and sequential position, participants can embody the relative primacy or subordination of their assessments to that of their co-participants through the formal design of their assessment turns C such as through the use of evidential markers, tag questions, negatively-framed questions, oh-prefacing, or a [conWrmation + agreement] turn format. Whether or not sequential positioning Wgures centrally in their discussions of the linguistic embodiment of stance, the majority of the studies discussed above nonetheless agree on the signiWcance of attending to sequential positioning as a resource for understanding the intricate relationship between the formal aspect of turn design and stance displays, though perhaps with some diVerences in their orientations to the phenomenon. In some studies (e.g., Local 1996; Freese and Maynard 1998; Koshik 2002), as discussed above, the signiWcance of sequential positioning lies in the fact that it can play a constitutive and deterministic role in giving meaning to certain linguistic practices and/or to the stances they embody. For example, a high pitch or a creaky voice in itself, as Freese and Maynard (1998) suggest, does not have any deterministic “meaning,” nor does it embody any speciWc stance, unless juxtaposed with other linguistic practices in situ. Other studies point to the work of sequential positioning as a resource for calibrating the sense of the stance indexed by certain linguistic practices. For example, in the series of studies investigating the practice of oh-prefacing discussed earlier, Heritage (1984b, 1998, 2002a) looks at the use of oh-prefacing in three distinctive sequential environments: (i) in response to turns in which information transmission Wgures centrally, (ii) in response to questions, and (iii) in response to assessments. Heritage argues that while oh-prefacing is used to make a generic “change-of-state” proposal in all three contexts, proposing that “its producer has undergone some kind of change in his or her locally current state of knowledge, information, orientation or awareness” (1984b:299), the speciWc sense of the stance conveyed through this practice is calibrated and particularized by reference to the context of its production. He suggests that in the latter two contexts, speakers exploit its “change-of-state” meaning to indicate that the question or the assessment responded to has occasioned a “marked shift of attention” on the part of the oh-speaker, which in turn suggests that the oh

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18


speaker is experiencing diYculties with the relevance, appropriateness or presuppositions of the question or the assessment. The importance of attending to sequential positioning in analyzing Mandarin Wnal particles in general, and in analyzing Wnal a and Wnal ou in particular, is not only an underlying premise of the present study, but also a running theme throughout most of this book. This theme is reXected most prominently in Chapters 3 and 4, in which two seemingly diVerent usages of Wnal ou (i.e., in Wrst and in responsive position) and two seemingly diVerent stances associated with the use of Wnal a (i.e., as reinforcing or reducing the forcefulness of an utterance) are both shown to be the products of a calibration of the basic indexical meanings of the two Wnal particles vis-à-vis the sequential contexts of their uses. That is to say, in both cases, sequential positioning plays an integral part in calibrating the sense and character of the stance indexed through the use of these two Wnal particles. In sum, the preceding review has investigated various developments in the recent study of the embodiment of stance in interactional contexts, with the goal of demonstrating that one central resource through which stance can be embodied is through the selection of turn design. Four major dimensions of turn design which have been foci of recent interactional studies of stance have been outlined and discussed in order to provide the reader with the appropriate context in which to interpret the present investigation. These areas are: (a) lexical choice; (b) syntactic design; (c) prosodic manifestation; and (d) sequential positioning. While these four dimensions are by no means the only aspects of turn design which may have a bearing on stance displays, they are nonetheless those which bear most directly on the present study as discussed above. At this juncture, it may be helpful to brieXy summarize the characteristics which unify the studies discussed up until now. Although the studies reviewed above diVer greatly in their analytic foci and in the prominence they give to the notion of “stance,” these studies, taken as a whole, share the following analytic perspectives: 1. Rather than treating the notion of “taking up a stance” as an undiVerentiated class of interactional phenomenon, and claiming, for example, that in using structure X, the speaker is “taking up a stance” toward matter Y, these studies seek to specify what kind of stance (e.g., problematizing the relevance of a question, highlighting an opposing stance, or alluding to the speaker’s

Introduction

prior orientation to the matter being addressed) is involved in the use of such a turn design, and by what interactional contingencies the stance has come to have the character it does. 2. These studies do not treat stance as a grammatical relation between linguistic elements and context, nor as an internal mental state of an individual, but rather as an action accomplished within speciWc sequential positions in interaction (cf. Besnier 1990; M. Goodwin and C. Goodwin 2000). Accordingly, the relevant unit for its analysis is “not the individual, or the semantic system of a language, but instead the sequential organization of action” (M. Goodwin and C. Goodwin 2000:33). 3. Like all other actions, then, the displaying of a stance is both “contextsensitive” and “context-renewing” (Heritage 1984a:242); it is constantly shaped by, and itself shapes, the unfolding development of interaction. In this process, linguistic resources or other practices can not only contribute to making the sense of the stance visible, but can also be used reXexively to embody or otherwise calibrate the sense of the stance commonly associated with their uses. 4. Like all other human actions, the displaying of a stance commonly requires the simultaneous deployment of a multiplicity of linguistic (and non-linguistic) resources, such as the lexical, syntactic, prosodic and sequential aspects of a turn design. Against the backdrop of this interactional approach to stance, the present study seeks to explore how the two Mandarin Wnal particles a and ou can be used in conjunction with other aspects of turn design to embody various stances in interaction. In addition, this study also seeks to explore how such interactional uses of these two Wnal particles can in turn shed light on our understanding of their meanings and properties. However, that much having been said, since this study is also among the very Wrst to explore the application of CA methodology to Mandarin Chinese data, we will turn now to a brief overview of recent developments in interactional research on Mandarin Chinese to portray the position of the present investigation within Chinese linguistics.

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1.3

Interactional studies in Mandarin Chinese

While conversation analysis and interactional linguistics have been demonstrated to be useful tools for uncovering the systematic organization of talkin-interaction, and how language Wgures in that process, the inXuence of these two Welds on Chinese linguistics has just begun to emerge. In this section, I will provide a brief overview of three recent threads of Chinese interactional studies published since the mid 1990s,5 and discuss how they stand in relation to conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. The Wrst thread of this research is represented by a body of work which seeks to address issues arising from, or related to, interactions among Mandarin speakers. The topics covered in this area of investigation include ambiguity (e.g., Ma 1996; Chang 1999), interruption (Ulijn and Li 1995), “luck talk” (Fong 2000), politeness (e.g., Chang 2001; Hong 2002), and sequential organization (Zhu, Li and Qian 2000). Although the topics addressed by this group of researchers overlap to a certain extent with those taken up in CA studies, this work diverges fundamentally from CA studies in that it seeks to approach these topics based not on naturally occurring conversation, but rather on Weld notes, role plays, survey results, or analysts’ intuitions. In contrast to this work, the second thread of research, which does use naturally occurring conversation as its data, and which often acknowledges ties to CA and interactional linguistics, focuses not on interaction per se, but rather on the linguistic aspects of interaction. Some such studies investigate the interactional use of linguistic forms or constructions, such as adverbial clauses (e.g., Y. Wang 1999, 2002), demonstratives (e.g., S. Huang 1999; Tao 1999), grammatical structures (e.g., Tao and Thompson 1994; Tao 1996), numeral-classiWers (e.g., W. Li 2000), reported speech (e.g., Kuo 2001), response tokens (e.g., Clancy, Thompson, Suzuki and Tao 1996), temporal reference (Wu 2002) and word order (e.g., Tai and Hu 1991; Guo 1999), whereas others analyze the use of interactional practices, such as conversational repairs (Chui 1996; Tao, Fox and de Garcia 1999), “opposition markers” (Kuo 1992) and overlaps (Biq 1998). While this body of research has uncovered interesting and robust relationships between the linguistic or interactional practices and their distributions in conversation, this scholarship is discourse-functional linguistic6 in orientation; and there is in general less attention given in this literature to the interactional work accomplished by the use of these practices.

Introduction

Of particular relevance to the present study is the third thread of research, which seeks to account for recurrent features or patterns of communication in conversation. Hopper and Chen (1996) and Sun (2002), for example, both investigate telephone conversation openings in Mandarin Chinese. While Hopper and Chen examine the sequential organization of these openings, Sun focuses on “identiWcation sequences”7 and demonstrates how “invited guessing” (ni zhidao wo shi shei ma ‘do you know who this is?’) can be used as a strategy and resource for indexing and strengthening interpersonal relationships. Despite their diVerences in analytic focus, both studies take an ethnographic approach to data,8 and seek, Wrst and foremost, to identify cultural speciWcities in the domains examined.9 Besides the ethnographic approach, other approaches have been adopted in recent studies exploring the recurrence of forms and structures in Chinese conversation. For example, Shie (1991) follows the contextualization framework proposed in SchiVrin (1987) in his comprehensive study of Mandarin Wnal particles. Y. Huang (1994) examines Mandarin anaphora from the neoGricean pragmatic perspective. I. Li (1999) takes a discourse-pragmatic approach to her analysis of Wnal particles in Taiwanese, while Chu (2002) adopts “relevance theory” (Sperber and Wilson 1986) in his investigation of the Mandarin Wnal particle a. To date, there are very few studies of Chinese conversation that have taken a CA approach. One notable exception in this regard is the inspiring work by Luke (1990), who demonstrates how conversation-analytic work can be brought to bear on Chinese C and in this case, Cantonese C data. His study focuses on three Cantonese Wnal particles, la, lo and wo, which he argues are “essentially indexical” but “do not have meanings given in advance” (Luke ibid.:265). He demonstrates how it is through an in-depth analysis of the sequential and activity contexts of the occurrences of these particles that a clearer picture of how Wnal particles “contribute to the assignment of meanings to utterances in context” (Luke ibid.:268) can start to emerge. Although the number is still relatively small, some scholars, such as Zhang (1998), He (2001) and myself (Wu 1997a), have also begun to apply CA methodology to Mandarin data. In my 1997 study, the focus is on the use of two discourse particles a and ei in two sequentially related contexts: (i) situations involving parties who are trying to make themselves focal where they have otherwise been playing a marginal role, and (ii) situations involving others trying to incorporate a previously not actively participating party. In

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this study, I demonstrate how these particles can be used in concert with body behavior in such contexts in the service of managing or transforming participation frameworks. In quite a divergent vein, Zhang (1998) presents an extensive study of the organization of repair in Mandarin conversation. Her Wndings not only attest to the sequential organization of repair, as observed in previous CA studies of English conversations (e.g., SchegloV 1979, 1992b, 1997b), but also reveal language-speciWc constraints on the ways in which repairs are implemented in Mandarin. In an educational context, both He (2001) and Chen and He (2001) have extended the application of CA methodology to Mandarin classroom data. While He focuses on communicative patterns observed in these classrooms, Chen and He explore the discourse-pragmatic functions of one speciWc tag question (dui bu dui) by investigating its sequential positions in classroom interactions. The present study positions itself among this last group of pioneering CA studies of Mandarin Chinese. While this study shares an analytic interest with the second strand of research discussed above in uncovering functional motivations for recurrent patterns of situated language use, it further seeks to understand such motivations not merely through the distribution of particular linguistic features, but rather through the actions and stances they accomplish in the evolving course of interaction, as evidenced by participants’ conduct. Such a shift of analytic perspective introduced by CA on what it is that constitutes “evidence” is consequential for our analysis of the two Mandarin Wnal particles, and is, in fact, what distinguishes the present study from most of the other recent investigations into Wnal particles reviewed above (e.g., Shie 1991; I. Li 1999; Chu 2002). We will return to this point in the next chapter.

1.4

Organization of the book

This chapter has introduced the objectives of the present study, and provided a brief overview of the current developments of the relevant Welds of study in which the present study is situated. The remainder of this book is organized in the following way. Chapter 2 introduces the phenomenon under investigation, discusses the analytic and methodological framework for this study, and

Introduction

as well provides a brief overview of the data analyzed in this study and its transcription procedures. The two subsequent chapters provide a detailed examination of the interactional uses of the two Wnal particles under investigation: Chapter 3 focuses on the use of Wnal ou, and Chapter 4 discusses the use of Wnal a. The Wnal chapter summarizes the Wndings presented in the main chapters and discusses the implications of this study.

Notes 1. I am indebted to Charles Goodwin for his input on this deWnition. 2. It should be noted that another major aspect of turn design which has a direct bearing on stance displays but which is not covered in this book is participants’ nonverbal conduct, such as laughter, facial expression, gestures, body orientation and the like. Nonverbal conduct has been excluded from the present study primarily because it does not seem to have the same order of relevance to the meanings and functions of the two Mandarin Wnal particles under investigation as do the other four aspects of turn design identiWed here. There is, however, a growing body of work investigating the relationship between nonverbal conduct and stance displays. See, for example, C. Goodwin 1981, 2000; Ford, Fox and Thompson 1996; Wu 1997a; M. Goodwin 1998; M. Goodwin and C. Goodwin 2000; Clayman 2002; M. Goodwin, C. Goodwin and Yaeger-Dror 2002; Hayashi, Mori and Takagi 2002; and Hayashi 2003, inter alia. 3. For a review of research investigating the relationship between language and aVect from a cross-linguistic, ethnographic perspective, see, for example, Ochs and SchieVelin 1989 and Besnier 1990. 4. See also SchegloV 1987b and 1997a for a discussion of the other functions of repeats. 5. See Biq, Tai and Thompson 1996 for a review of functional linguistic studies of Chinese from the 1970s to the early 1990s, and Biq 2000 for a review of more recent studies in discourse-and-grammar. 6. See Cumming and Ono 1997 and Ford, Fox and Thompson 2002:4B7 for a review of discourse-functional linguistics. 7. See SchegloV 1986 for a discussion of canonical American telephone openings, and SchegloV 2002 for a discussion of issues related to cross-cultural research on telephone conversation. 8. See SchiVrin 1994 for a discussion of distinctions between the ethnography of communication and conversation analysis. 9.

While the arguments in these two studies are generally convincing, a few comments on the results reported in Hopper and Chen (1996) regarding the use of the two Mandarin Wnal particles a and ou, which are the primary foci of this study, are in order. Hopper and Chen argue that when the Wnal particles a and ou are attached to a name (e.g., Chen Chia-

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24

Final Particles in Mandarin

Hui A?) in telephone openings, they are used as “greeting tokens,” greeting “a well-known other but also express[ing] some uncertainty about the identiWcation” (Hopper and Chen ibid.:299). However, as I will suggest in this study, although a and ou can be attached to a non-interrogative statement and thereby transform that statement into a conWrmation question, they themselves do not serve as “greeting tokens.” The import of greeting that Hopper and Chen claim to be associated with the use of a and ou, I would argue, comes more from the fact that these two Wnal particles are attached to the name of a potential call-recipient, in a sequential position in which mutual identiWcations and recognitions are highly relevant. In other words, the import comes not from the Wnal particles per se, but rather as a product of an interplay of the utterances to which the Wnal particles are attached and the sequential positioning of these utterances. The Wnal particles a and ou, in and of themselves, are used only to display the speaker’s less than full certainty about the matter being addressed.

Preliminaries and methodology

Chapter 2


In order to place the present study in its proper context, a discussion of some of the theoretical and methodological issues which arise in the study of Wnal particles is presented in this chapter. SpeciWcally, this chapter gives a brief description of the features of Wnal particles, discusses previous studies and related methodological issues and problems, and provides an overview of the theoretical and methodological framework of this study. In addition, a description of the database analyzed and the transcription procedures utilized is provided.

2.1

Context of the problem

The phenomena chosen for investigation in this study C what I term “Wnal particles”1 C have been variously labeled as zhu ci ‘helping words,’ yuqi ci ‘mood words’ (Lü and Zhu 1953; L. Wang 1955), “sentence-Wnal particles” (Li and Thompson 1981), “utterance particles” (Luke 1990), “modal particles” (Chappell 1991), “interactional particles” (Maynard 1993), and “aVective particles” (Hsu 1996), among others. As most of these terms suggest, these particles are essentially discourse-dependent: They do not have a denotative or referential meaning, but are mainly used, among other things, to convey emotive and/or epistemic nuances on the part of a speaker within a particular discourse context. These particles play an important role in interactions among speakers of Mandarin Chinese. First, they are massively recurrent in ordinary conversation,2 especially in contexts which are highly emotionally-loaded. Consider, for example, the following excerpt from a multi-party conversation among a group of friends, in which they are discussing the ticket prices of two airlines:3

25

26


(1) (CS Party 057A) 1C:

keshi huahang gen changrong dou shi bijiao gui de ((to X)) but (airlines) with (airlines) both be relatively expensive PRT ‘But both China Airlines and EVA Airlines are more expensive.’

2

(0.5)

3X:→

jushuo huahang hen pianyi a I-heard (airlines) very cheap PRT ‘I heard that China Airlines is very cheap A.’

4

(.)

5C:

[ (tamen geng) pianyi. they more cheap [‘(They are) cheap(er).’

6W:→

[ bu hui ba. huahang hai shi hen gui a N ASP PRT (airlines) still be very expensive PRT [‘Not likely BA. China Airlines is still very expensive A.’

7X:→

jushuo xianzai yijing bijiao pianyi le a I-heard now already relatively cheap CRS PRT ‘I heard (it) has already become cheaper now A.’

8

(1.5)

9X:

[keshi yao renshou shengming-renshou shengming de weixian but need bear life bear life PRT danger [‘But (you) need to tolerate the risk of life.’

10W:→ [ keneng yao liu bai duo ba. (Y) dancheng (Y) ((to L)) probably need six hundred more PRT one-way [‘(It’ll) probably cost more than six hundred BA. (Y) one way (Y)’ 11L:→ wo yao mai- laihui de a. I want buy round-trip PRT PRT ‘I want to buy- a round-trip ticket A.’ 12W:

ou PRT ‘Oh.’


13L:→

laihui bijiao pianyi a. round-trip relatively cheap PRT ‘Round-trip (tickets) are cheaper A.’

14

(1.0)

15H:

a? ni yao mai laihui. PRTyou want buy round-trip ‘A? You’ll buy a round-trip (ticket)?’

16L:→

dui a. na %eventually% ni hai shi hui yong dao a. right PRT that eventually you still be ASP use RES PRT ‘(That’s) right A. You’ll still %eventually% need that A.’

17H:→ danshi ta na ge bu shi hui %expire% ma. but it that C N be ASP expire Q ‘But isn’t it true that it will %expire% MA?’ 18H:

shuo ji ge- duojiu mei yong jiu [hui %expire%.= say several C how-long N use then ASP expire ‘(If you) don’t use (it) in a few- for some time, [(it’)ll then %expire%.’=

19X:→

[dui a. right PRT [‘(That’s) right A.’=

20L:→ =[dui a. right PRT =[‘(That’s) right A.’ 21X:→ =[rong ni hai zai zheli ma, dui bu dui. ((to R)) (name) you still at here PRT right N right =[‘Rong, you will still be here MA, right?’ 22R:→ dui a. hhh right PRT (laugh) ‘(That’s) right A. hhh’ 23X:→ dui a. suoyi ni hai hui huilai a. right PRT so you still ASP return PRT ‘(That’s) right A. So you’ll still come back A.’ 24L:→ dui a. right PRT ‘(That’s) right A.’

((to L))

27

28


Without going into much detail,4 suYce it to note that there is a total of 17 instances of Wnal particles in this 27-second disagreement sequence. Mandarin Wnal particles have also been claimed to serve various types of important semantic and pragmatic functions (see, for example, Chao 1968; Alleton 1981; Li and Thompson 1981; Chu 1984, 2002; King 1986; Chappell 1991; Shi and Zhang 1995). From a conversation-analytic perspective, one of the most important functions these Wnal particles have is that they provide a valuable resource which conversational coparticipants may use (along with other resources) in their attempt to build in grounding for intersubjectivity5 in talk-in-interaction. More speciWcally, like other organizational features of ordinary conversation, the selection and use of a Wnal particle at any given moment routinely embodies participants’ analysis of, and orientation to, one another’s conduct, expectations, understanding, stance, and so forth. In fact, a cursory examination of the present corpus interestingly reveals that parties to conversation undertake to repair their use of Wnal particles, just as they repair other utterances: They add, delete or otherwise replace a Wnal particle in the unfolding development of action and interaction in order to calibrate or revise the stance they wish to put forward. Excerpts (2)B(4) illustrate this. Excerpt (2), taken from the same conversation as excerpt (1), begins with host W’s calling attention to the Sesame-oil Chicken dish C a highly nutritious dish traditionally only served in the wintertime: (2) (CS Party authentic 034)

1W:

2

[((reaching his arm to lift up the lid of the pot where the chicken is)) ou, zhe ge- zhe (ge)/(shi) mayou ji. PRT this C this C be sesame-oil chicken ‘Oh, this- this is “Sesame-oil Chicken.”’ [((L returning to his seat)) (0.7)

3L:→

shei yao jinbu= who need supplement-nutrition ‘Who needs to supplement food with extra nutrition?’=

4L:=>

=shei yao bu a) who need supplement-nutrition PRT =‘Who needs to supplement A)’


5L:

6W:

[((looking at W, smiling)) [ni yao bu you need supplement-nutrition [‘You need to supplement?’ [dajia dou yao bu. ((smile voice)) everybody all need supplement-nutrition [‘Everybody needs to supplement.’

Note here that immediately after L launches an inquiry in line 3 (shei yao jinbu ‘who needs to supplement food with extra nutrition’), he moves (in line 4) to redo C and repair C this inquiry by suYxing it with a Wnal a. While in excerpt (2) the speaker subsequently adds a Wnal particle to an arguably same utterance, the repair undertaken by the speaker in excerpt (3) diVers in that he deletes a previously-used Wnal particle in a subsequent turn: (3) (T-career 007) 1L:

suoyi ni- (.) hai shi zai ni nabian gongzuo. so you stil be be you there work ‘So you- (.) still work in (the area) where you live?’

2U:

dui dui. dui right right right ‘Right. Right. Right.’

3L:→

ou::. weishenme a) PRT why PRT ‘Oh::. How come A)’

4U:

huh? huh ‘Huh?’

5L:=>

weishenme. why ‘How come?’

6U:

uh: fanzheng: (.) qu yi jia xiao gongsi: (.) ye: bu cuo. uh anyway go one C small company also N wrong ‘Uh: Anyway: (.) Working for a small company: (.) is also: not bad.’

In this excerpt, we can note that while speaker L’s initial inquiry in line 3 (weishenme a ‘how come A’) is suYxed with a Wnal a, his subsequent

29

30


reproduction of this question (in line 5), in response to the interlocutor’s production of huh, leaves out this Wnal particle. As these two excerpts will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4,6 I will not greatly elaborate these instances here, except to note that the use and nonuse of Wnal a as exempliWed in excerpts (2) and (3) are closely tied to the speakers’ moment-by-moment analysis of the interactional contingencies arising in the unfolding activities they are engaged in, as well as to the kind of stance they wish to embody in their conduct of interaction vis-à-vis these contingencies. Such an embodiment of stance can be reXected not only through the addition or deletion of a Wnal particle, but also through its replacement. Consider, for example, excerpt (4) below. As this excerpt begins, there are two concurrent ongoing “conversational clusters” (Egbert 1993, 1997a) in lines 1B6, where one group of participants (i.e., L and W) are discussing how to teach one particular course while the other group of participants (i.e., C and R) are clarifying the location of a university where L is going to teach soon. (4) (CS Party 310A) 1R:

dui a. zhongshan cai zai gaoxiong. L: keshi- yuanli nime- kao guo ma right PRT (school) justbe (city) but theory you test ASP Q ‘(That’s) right. It’s Zhongshan ‘But- were you- ever tested on (University) that is in Kaohsiung.’ the theory?’

2:

(1.0)

3

4C:

zai jiayi. at (city) ‘In Jiayi.’

5

6C:→

(.) W: women you zuo guo a. we have do ASP PRT ‘We did have the experience.’ (.)

W: jiu san ge %project% justthree C project ‘Only three %projects%.’ [↑hao pianpi ei. very isolated PRT [‘↑How isolated EI!’

W: [chong nong a. again do PRT [‘(We) redid (them).’


7

*(0.8)

8L:

huh huh ‘Huh?’

9C:

hh[hh (laugh) ‘hh[hh’

10L:

((* to* L turns his eye gaze toward C. C then puts her hand over her mouth and leans away from L.))

[shenme what [‘What?’

11C:→ zhongcheng hao pianpi ou= (school) very isolated PRT ‘How isolated Zhongcheng (University) is OU!’= 12C:

=pangbian dou mei you- meiyou shenme dongxi. * beside all N have N have what thing =‘There is not- nothing nearby.’

At the possible completion of the clarifying sequence of the location of the university, speaker C articulates a negative assessment of this university and suYxes this assessment with a Wnal particle, ei (line 6). Although this assessment is not launched to directly address L, who is engaged in another conversation at the moment, L nonetheless stops the conversation in progress by directing his gaze toward C, and produces a repair initiator, huh (line 8). Upon receiving L’s eye gaze and repair initiation, C puts her right hand over her mouth and leans in another direction, laughing embarrassedly. After L produces another repair initiation, shenme ‘what’ (in line 10), C reproduces her earlier assessment, with some modiWcations (line 11), one of these including the use of another Wnal particle therein (i.e., ou). Without further explication of what has been accomplished by the replacement of the Wnal particles here, it is suYcient, for the moment, to note that C’s self-repair on the Wnal particle has an important bearing on what she perceives will be conveyed and accomplished through these two Wnal particles, as well as on her analysis of which form she is to use as a result of whom that utterance is designed to address.

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32


Despite their pervasive presence and the important interactional and indexical functions they seem to perform in natural, mundane conversation in Mandarin Chinese, our knowledge about the meanings and usages of these Wnal particles is, at best, fragmentary at present. In part, this is because, as noted earlier, Wnal particles do not have referential meanings but are only indexical in nature. Such an elusive quality of Wnal particles, as several linguists (e.g., Li and Thompson 1981; Luke 1990) have registered, makes it a diYcult, if not impossible, task to provide a general characterization of their meanings and usages. Over the years, various approaches have been adopted in tackling this issue, with varying degrees of success. Traditional treatment of Mandarin Wnal particles, for example, has focused mainly on the analysis of sentences in isolation, or on the analysis of hypothetical conversational situations or written texts (e.g., Chao 1968; Alleton 1981; Zhu 1982; Li and Thompson 1981; Shi and Zhang 1995). However, given that Wnal particles are most frequently used in spontaneous conversations,7 isolating Wnal particles from their actual contexts of use fails to reveal the types of activities they are a part of and the kinds of actions they are used to accomplish. While some of these studies have yielded Wndings that are intuitively appealing or even quite accurate, their observations must be supplemented by detailed examination of the particles’ actual occurrence in order to obtain a more complete picture of the functions and usages of these Wnal particles in naturally occurring conversation. With a growing awareness of the importance of extrasentential factors on the use of Wnal particles, a number of Chinese linguists have started to base their analyses of Wnal particles on authentic conversational data. And yet, much scholarship in this area, although taking empirical data as its object of study, does not always ground its analyses in the empirical conduct of participants. A common approach taken by this body of work is to present the distribution of the Wnal particles under investigation, and then, perhaps, go a step further to make generalizations about their core functions and usages based on those distributions. While such an approach is a necessary Wrst step in advancing our understanding of Wnal particles, problems may arise depending on how this distributional information is brought to bear on the claims or generalizations made by researchers. One common problem has to do with a lack of empirical support for such generalizations; that is, there is a lack of evidence that the core meaning proposed for a given Wnal particle based on its distribution is indeed what the


participants have understood it to be, rather than simply being an analytic imposition on the part of the researcher. In the contemporary literature on Wnal particles, for example, a common approach is to Wrst present a segment of data, and then to follow it with the researcher’s claim of what he or she thinks the particle speaker is intending to do in using that particle C without, however, grounding that claim in the conduct of the participants. One danger of such an “interpretivist” approach is that the validity of such claims is completely subject to the researcher’s native competence or intuitions, and what has been claimed by these researchers may not square with what has indeed been understood and experienced by the participants. Another common problem is what can be termed a compounding issue. That is, even though there seems to be a connection between the distribution of a Wnal particle and the core functions it is proposed to have, it is not clear whether that usage comes solely from the particle, the sequential environments of its occurrences, or an interaction of both. In criticizing I. Li’s (1999) proposal of the core property of the Taiwanese Wnal particle a as marking “information activation,” for example, Chu (2002:24) argues: [M]ost utterances, with or without the particle, seem to serve the function of activating information equally well, in the sense that the speaker is indicating to the addressees that the particular piece of information contained in the utterance is being used for the purpose of communication within the contextY In fact, the mere act of bringing up any information serves the function of activating that piece of information.

However, despite the fact that Chu’s (2002) work on the Mandarin Wnal particle a is one of the most comprehensive studies to date in this area, his proposal that Wnal a serves mainly to mark “speaker involvement” is not itself immune to this compounding problem, for in so far as a speaker chooses to produce an utterance about, or a response to, a particular matter, he or she can be seen as indicating his or her involvement in that matter. The claim that Wnal particle a serves the main function of indicating “speaker involvement” thus does not fully explain why a speaker chooses the practice of a-suYxing when, in fact, there is always a wide array of possible ways in which speaker involvement can be displayed as well as a wide variety of utterances which could be argued to carry “speaker involvement” but do not end in Wnal a. To avoid these analytic problems, a cogent account of Wnal particles therefore not only requires compelling exempliWcations in the display of data which demonstrate that the participants in the data have indeed used and

33

34


understood the Wnal particles as proposed by the researcher; such an account also requires evidence that builds from the particles’ “eventful nonoccurrence” in analytically comparable sequences (cf. SchegloV 1996a:192B199) C that is, evidence which shows that there are indeed systematic diVerences in action or stance being accomplished through the use and non-use of a given Wnal particle. While many researchers have undertaken to demonstrate such a contrast in their investigations of Wnal particles (e.g., Lee-Wong 1998; I. Li 1999; Chu 2002), a predominant approach used by these researchers is to suppose how the meanings of the excerpts would be changed if the Wnal particles had not been used. Such an approach unfortunately suVers from the same problem as the “interpretivist” approach discussed earlier, in that the claims made by the researchers are not empirically warranted, which renders the validity of these claims questionable. In view of this problem, it is thus essential for a proper account to empirically demonstrate, rather than to suppose or claim, the diVerences between the deployment and non-deployment of Wnal particles C through juxtaposition of analytically comparable excerpts from naturally occurring data and through exploration of the interpretative or analytic grounds for the use and non-use of these particles as manifested in the participants’ conduct. Since much of what has been discussed in this section about that which should ideally enter into an empirical account of Wnal particles is compatible with, and informed by, conversation analysis, which is central to the work presented in this book, let us turn now to a brief overview of conversation analysis.

2.2

Methodology and data

2.2.1 Conversation analysis Conversation analysis (CA) C the major theoretical and methodological framework of this study C is a Weld of research that originated in the 1960s through collaboration between Harvey Sacks, Emanuel SchegloV and Gail JeVerson. A central tenet of CA is the view that conversation C as a primordial site, and the basic form, of social interaction C is structurally organized; it is “a describable domain of interactional activity exhibiting stable, orderly properties that are the speciWc and analyzable achievements of speakers and hearers” (Zimmerman 1988:407). The primary goal of CA, then, has been to uncover


and describe the organizational features of ordinary conversation and other talk-in-interaction which provide interactants the resources for building in a routine grounding for intersubjectivity. Although CA methodology cannot be adequately covered in the space available here, it may be useful to brieXy outline a few key features that diVerentiate CA from other approaches which otherwise also employ and/or examine conversational data,8 and that have important bearings on the present study.9 The Wrst feature has to do with its theoretical premise that talk should be treated not only as a syntactic code, nor as a tool of description, but rather as a mode of action embedded within human interaction. More speciWcally, the production of talk as a mode of action is “doubly contextual” (Heritage 1984a:242): It is “context-shaped” in that its production and interactional import cannot be adequately understood without reference to the context in which it occurs C including, especially, the local conWguration of the preceding actions. On the other hand, each interactional contribution, including the production of talk and its eventful absence, is “context-renewing” because it has the capacity for creating and providing a new context for subsequent action. When viewed from this perspective, then, the production of talk as a mode of action is not merely contextually-licensed (cf. speech act theory); it in fact stands in a reXexive relationship to the context in which it participates. CA’s views of talk as a mode of action and the reXexive character of talk are consequential for its analytic orientation. For one thing, if talk constitutes action, then it follows that, for each spate of talk, there is almost always an issue of what is being accomplished by its production in this particular hereand-now (cf. SchegloV 1996c) C or, to put it another way, “why that now” (SchegloV and Sacks 1973:299). And insofar as this is an issue for parties to talk-in-interaction, it becomes a task of analysis for professional analysts. From a conversation-analytic perspective, one key aspect which underlies this issue of “why that now” is “recipient design” C that is, “[the] multitude of respects in which the talk by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an orientation and sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the co-participants” (Sacks, SchegloV and JeVerson 1974:727). In the organization of their action, participants ordinarily take into consideration these contingencies as they demonstrate in their next moves what sense they make of a prior speaker’s action. Accordingly, to get at the participants’ “then-relevant” sense of these contingencies, the immediately

35

36


subsequent moves by the participants commonly become analytic loci for conversation analysts. In fact, from its inception, one of the most distinctive features of CA has been its stringent reliance on the observable conduct of participants as its central resource for developing analyses. One upshot of this feature is that no order of detail in interaction can be dismissed, a priori, as irrelevant; and conversely, no analytic distinctions or social characterizations of participants (e.g., age, class, gender, etc.) C however relevant they are to particular disciplines C should assume a Wrst-order relevance in analyzing actual talk-ininteraction. This is not to say that CA takes the position that such analytic distinctions or social characterizations have absolutely no bearing on participants’ conduct on any given occasion, only that any claims made along those lines should be empirically grounded and warranted. A fundamental criterion of conversation analytic work thus is to warrant that the characterizations and interpretations of particular aspects of an interactional occasion are grounded not only in aspects which are “demonstrably relevant” to the participants, but also in those which have “determinate consequences” for that occasion (SchegloV 1991). As SchegloV (1992a:196) points out: Not all aspects of setting or of capacity in which persons are acting are consequential for all aspects of what they say or do. That two interactants are relevantly doctors talking in a medical setting, and about medical matters, is not necessarily consequential for the way in which they deploy hand gestures which occur in the course of their talk or the way in which they refer to a prospective fourth for their golWng outing on Wednesday. So, even if one can show that, of the descriptions of the settings and persons which could be invoked, some particular ones are relevant to the participants in the interaction, it remains to be shown that they are procedurally consequential for the particular aspect of the talk or other conduct which is the focus of analysis C that is, that there is a consequential tie (again, for the participants) between the setting and interactional identities so understood and a particular facet of their conduct.

These analytic orientations of CA are clearly spelled out in SchegloV (1996a), in which he outlines three distinctive elements which should ideally enter into an empirically grounded account of action: 1. First, the account requires a formulation of what action or actions are being accomplished, with compelling exempliWcations in displays of data and analysis, including ways of “testing” the claim via confrontation of problematic instances and apparent “deviant cases,” if possible.


2. Second, there must be a grounding of this formulation in the “reality” of the participantsYThis requires some demonstration that the interlocutors in the data being examined have understood the utterances (or other conduct) in question to be possibly doing the proposed action(s) or that they are oriented to that possibility C a demonstration ordinarily grounded in the interlocutors’ subsequent talk or conduct. 3. A third element of a proper account of an action is an explication and analysis of what it is about the observed talk or other conduct or the practices embodied in it, which makes the enactment of that talk/conduct possibly an instance of the proposed action, and makes it analyzable by the coparticipants as an instance of that action, that is, why or how that practice can yield that action. It is not enough to show that some utterance was understood by its recipient to implement a particular actionYIn order to provide analytically the grounds for the possibility of such an understanding, an account must be oVered of what about the production of that talk/conduct provided for its recognizability as such an action; that is, what were the methodical, or procedural, or “practice-d” grounds of its production. Once explicated and established, this serves as part of the account of the utterance/action, whether or not it was so understood by its recipient on any particular occasion. (ibid.:172B173, emphasis original).

These three elements provide the points of reference for the present study and will be addressed in the discussion of the two target Wnal particles in Chapters 3 and 4. In the past two decades, CA has been demonstrated to be a useful tool for uncovering the systematic organizations of ordinary conversation and other talk-in-interaction, accumulating penetrating accounts in such areas as turn organization (e.g., Sacks, SchegloV and JeVerson 1974; SchegloV 1996b, 2000a, 2001), repair organization (e.g., SchegloV, JeVerson and Sacks 1977; SchegloV 1979, 1987a, 1992b, 1997a, 1997b, 2000b; JeVerson 1987), preference organization (e.g., Sacks 1987 [1973]; Pomerantz 1984), assessment organization (e.g., Pomerantz 1984; C. Goodwin and M. Goodwin 1987, 1992), storytelling organization (e.g., Sacks 1974; JeVerson 1978; C. Goodwin 1984, 1986; SchegloV 1992a), sequence organization (e.g., SchegloV 1990, 1995, to appear) and, more recently, the interface between grammar and interaction (e.g., Fox 1987; Ford 1993; Heritage and Roth 1995; Ochs, SchegloV and Thompson 1996; Clift 2001; Selting and Couper-Kuhlen 2001; Ford, Fox and Thompson 2002). These studies provide a body of Wndings which attest to general tendencies of recurrent features of talk-in-interaction, and which will serve as points of departure for the present investigation.

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Although, until recently, conversation analytic research has based its claims primarily on English materials, and hence has been criticized as being biased toward interactional patterns speciWc to Western cultures (cf. Duranti 1988), there has been a growing interest, especially in the last 10 years or so, in conducting CA research in languages other than English. This expanding body of research includes, inter alia, studies of Finnish (e.g., Sorjonen 1996, 1997, 2001, 2002), German (e.g., Egbert 1993, 1996, 1997a, 1997b), Japanese (e.g., Hayashi 1999, 2001, 2003; Hayashi, Mori and Takagi 2002; Mori 1999; Tanaka 1999), Korean (e.g., Kim 1999a, 1999b, 2001; Park 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002) and Swedish (e.g., Lindström 1994, 1997). In the area of Chinese, while the potential of CA to oVer new perspectives on both old and new issues in Chinese linguistics has been repeatedly stressed in a few recent survey studies (e.g., Biq, Tai and Thompson 1996; Biq 2000), there have been very few investigations to date that have followed a strictly-CA approach, as discussed in Chapter 1. This is an area where research is very much needed and the work presented in this book is part of a larger eVort to Wll this gap.

2.2.2 The data The core corpus for the present study consists of seven telephone conversations and four video-taped multi-party, face-to-face conversations among family members, friends, or acquaintances, collected and transcribed by myself. It totals approximately twelve hours of interaction. There are altogether 28 diVerent speakers, 18 women and 10 men, all native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The ages of these speakers range from mid-twenties to late sixties. Most of them have received at least a high-school education. Following are brief descriptions of these conversations, each given a designation to reXect the nature or the theme of the conversation: T-Dancer: a telephone conversation between two Taiwanese female acquaintances. Both participants, X and D,10 are graduate students, in their late twenties. X is a dance major and D a history major. The topics of this conversation center around a few friends they both know of, X’s description of her past training experience at school and her comments on a career in dance in general. Data collected in the US. T-Number: a brief telephone conversation between two Taiwanese female friends. The purpose of this phone call is for one of the participants, Hua, to obtain the telephone number of a friend from the other participant in this


conversation. Hua is a graduate student, in her late twenties. Data collected in the US. T-Stock Lady: a very brief telephone conversation between a woman in her early sixties and her stock broker, about whether a previous buy order she requested over the phone has gone through. Data collected in Taiwan. T-Telnet: a brief telephone conversation between a man in his late sixties and his son, in his mid-twenties. Data collected in Taiwan. T-Copyright: a telephone conversation between two Taiwanese male friends, Lin and Tai, in their early thirties. Lin has just received his Ph.D. degree and Tai is planning to Wle his thesis two days after this phone conversation. Lin is returning an earlier call by Tai, who had called Lin at Lin’s girlfriend’s house to inquire about the procedures for Wling a thesis. Data collected in the US. T-Career: a telephone conversation between two Taiwanese male friends, Lin and Un, in their early thirties. They used to be college classmates while in Taiwan. Un has just established his own company in the United States and Lin has just obtained his Ph.D. and will be moving back to Taiwan soon. The conversation is mainly about their careers/future careers and some relevant topics. Data collected in the US. T-OYcemate: a telephone conversation between two Taiwanese male friends, Lin and Wu, in their early thirties. They studied in the same university in Taiwan and are now working under the same supervisor in the United States. The conversation centers around another oYcemate of theirs and some academic issues. Data collected in the US. Three Friends: a video-taped face-to-face conversation among three Taiwanese friends, Dai, Chi and Shu. Chi and Shu are boyfriend/girlfriend, living together. All of them are graduate students at the same university. Chi is the president of the Chinese Student Association of the school. The conversation centers around their past experiences and recent lives. Data collected in the US. CS Party: a video-taped face-to-face conversation among a group of friends, Wve men (Lin, Wu, Tsai, Xu and Han) and two women (Christel and Rong). Except for Christel, who is visiting the US on vacation, all the other participants are graduate students. The Wve male participants, all of whom graduated from the same university in Taiwan, are studying in the same department (Computer Science) now. Lin and Rong are boyfriend/girlfriend. Participants’ ages range from early twenties to early thirties. This gathering is

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assembled as a farewell party for Lin, who has just graduated and will return to Taiwan soon. Conversation topics vary. Data collected in the US. Café: a video-taped face-to-face conversation among four female college friends in their late twenties. Three of the participants (Ling, Yin and May) are teachers. This gathering is assembled when Ling and her husband (who is not present on this occasion) are bringing their students on a graduation trip to a southern city in Taiwan, where the other participants live. Ling and Yin have had occasional contact with each other since graduation. The other two participants, Rong and May, have neither seen Ling nor contacted her for about seven years before this gathering. Data collected in Taiwan. Tea Time: a video-taped face-to-face conversation among six female friends C Hui and Li, in their forties, Wen, Feng, Su, in their early thirties, and Rong, in her late twenties. Feng, Li, Hui and Su are teaching at a senior high school. Wen and Rong, their former colleagues, are studying in the United States and are on a short vacation home when this conversation is recorded. Two of the participants do not stay for the entire gathering: Li arrives thirty minutes late and Feng leaves after lunch. Data collected in Taiwan. As is apparent from the description, all of the speakers in the core corpus are from Taiwan. To make the results of this study generalizable to more than one speech community, the corpus is supplemented with approximately four hours of video-taped face-to-face conversations which took place among native speakers of Mandarin Chinese from Mainland China.11 While it is beyond the scope of the present study to provide a detailed description of the diVerences in usage of the two Wnal particles, a and ou, in Mainland China and Taiwan,12,13 some of the diVerences will be noted in Chapters 3 and 4, where relevant. Table 1 provides a summary of the database analyzed in this study.

2.2.3 Transcription conventions The data analyzed in this study were transcribed using the pinyin system of romanization without tone marks.14 Although utterances were transcribed according to their standard Mandarin pronunciations, phonetic variations of the utterances, such as vowel lengthening and aspiration, were also noted in the transcriptions and were transcribed according to the transcription conventions developed by JeVerson (1984), with slight modiWcations.15


Table 1. Summary of the database

Primary Database T-Dancer T-Number T-Stock Lady T-Telnet T-Copyright T-Career T-Officemate Three Friends CS Party Café Tea Time

Type

Date

Length

Participants

telephone telephone telephone telephone telephone telephone telephone video-taped face-to-face video-taped face-to-face video-taped face-to-face video-taped face-to-face

10/31/92 10/92 12/96 12/96 8/29/96 8/24/96 8/22/96

20’38" 1’30" 0’21" 2’47" 38’32" 23’52" 36’14"

2 women 2 women 2 women 2 men 2 men 2 men 2 men

4/1/95

1 hr 8’

2 women and1 man

8/24/96

approx. 3 hrs

2 women and 5 men

12/26/96

approx. 2 hrs

4 women

1/2/97

approx. 4 hrs approx. 12 hrs

6 women 28 (different) speakers: 18 women and 10 men

Subtotal

Other Data video-taped face-to-face

Total

6/96-8/96 approx. 4 hrs

approx. 16 hrs

9 (different) speakers: 4 women and 5 men 37 (different) speakers: 22 women and 15 men

Each transcribed Mandarin utterance normally has two lines of English below it. In the line immediately below the Mandarin utterance, I have glossed each Mandarin element with its literal English equivalent. In the second line, I oVer a translation of the whole utterance into idiomatic English, attempting to preserve the “Xavor” of the Mandarin utterance if possible. In cases where there are overlaps between speakers’ utterances, I have aligned the Mandarin originals as well as the English translations; the result of this is that the English translations may not always appear directly below their word-by-word glosses, as in the following excerpt:

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42


(5) (CS Party A081B; video 52’20”) [((looking at C and sustaining mutual gazes with her)) bu shenme- %bi ke% a [(Y.) cram what (Taiwanese food) PRT => ‘They teach (people) how to make %bi ke% A[(Y)’

1R: →

2C:→ =>

[ou PRT [‘Oh.’

As also exempliWed in (5), non-vocal actions are noted above the Mandarin originals when they appear pertinent to the analysis. In addition, Wnal particles are included in the English translations, in capitals, when (and only when) they are the principal subjects of discussion at the moment. Various aspects of interaction, such as overlapping talk, silence and other speciWcs, are noted in the lines of the original Mandarin utterances and their English translations. However, because of the diVerences between English and Mandarin, such as diVerences in word order, the speciWcs about the speaker’s delivery of the turn in the English translations are not exact, and the original Mandarin utterances should always be consulted when reading the transcriptions.

2.2.4 Target forms: Wnal a and Wnal ou in TCU-Wnal position Although Mandarin Chinese has a wide array of Wnal particles serving various types of functions, as discussed in Section 2.1, it should be noted that not all Wnal particles are equal in terms of the locations they are eligible to occupy. Chao (1968), for example, has categorized Wnal particles into three types: those which occur after phrases only (e.g., the particle lie; (6)), those which occur only as sentence particles (e.g., the particle ma; (7)), and those which occur in either function (e.g., the particle a; (8), (9)), as illustrated below: (6)16 (Chao 1968:796) Daqiu lie, xiaqi lie, shenme de, ta yangyang dou hui. play-ball PRT, play-chess PRT, what PRT 3sg everything all can ‘Playing ball LIE, playing chess LIE, and so forth, he can do all of them.’


(7) (Chao 1968:796) Ni zhidao ma you know Q ‘Do you know MA?’ (8) (Chao 1968:796) Yaoshi zou a, mei panfei. if go PRT N money ‘If (I) go A, (I’ll) have no money to travel.’ (9) (Chao 1968:796) Mei panfei ye dei zou a N money also have-to go PRT ‘Even without travel money, (you) still have to go A.’

While Chao’s observation of the existence of such a distinction between Wnal particles is intuitively appealing, in view of the commonly-registered diYculty in deWning the notion of “sentence” in structural terms (e.g., Jespersen 1924:308; Li and Thompson 1981; Tao 1996:16B17), and in keeping with the analytic orientation of the present study, I would propose a diVerent classiWcation of Wnal particles, based not on their location by reference to the morphosyntactic units in traditional grammar (i.e., “sentence” or “phrase”), but rather on their location within a turn C i.e., whether or not they occur in TCU (turn constructional unit) Wnal position. Simply put, “turn constructional units” are deWned in the CA literature as units which “can constitute possibly complete turns; on their possible completion, transition to a next speaker becomes relevant (although not necessarily accomplished)” (SchegloV 1996b:55; cf., also, Sacks, SchegloV and JeVerson 1974; Ford and Thompson 1996). Based on this deWnition, it is observed that Mandarin Wnal particles, although overwhelmingly appearing at the end of an intonation unit (Tao 1996), do not always occur at the end of a TCU. The key objects of this study C Wnal ou and Wnal a C are among those which commonly occur in both TCU-Wnal and non-TCU-Wnal positions. This is illustrated in the following excerpts, all drawn from the present corpus: Excerpts (10) and (11) demonstrate the use of Wnal ou and Wnal a respectively in nonTCU-Wnal position, while excerpts (12)B(14) demonstrate the use of Wnal ou and Wnal a respectively in TCU-Wnal position.

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44


In non-TCU-Wnal position (10) (T-Dancer) ((D is reporting what a dancer had told her about the consequence of the dance training.)) 1D:

meixin jiu shuo- ta jiu gen women shuo= (name) then say 3sg then with we say ‘Meixin then said- She then told us’=

2D:

=ni buyao kan tiaowu hen piaoliang. you N see dance very pretty =‘“Don’t you (just) think that dancing is very pretty.”’

3X:

uh PRT ‘Uh.’

4D:→

shijishang ou (0.3) actually PRT ‘“Actually OU, (0.3)”’

5D:

jiu biancheng zoulu deshihou jiu hen nankan then become walk when then very ugly ‘“it turns out that when (dancers) walk, (they) walk in a very ugly way.”’

(11) (T-oYcemate 213) ((L is telling one colleague about how he had responded to their supervisor’s inquiry about whether or not another colleague of theirs had contributed much to a joint project.)) 1L:

wo shi shuo:: tch! shuo you la, I just say say have PRT ‘I said:: tch! said, “Yes.”’

2L:→

ta bangmang %install% a, 3sg help install PRT ‘“She helped %install% (the computers) A,”’

3L:→

%set up% naxie dongxi aset up those stuV PRT ‘“%set up% that stuV A-”’

4L:→

ta shi- ta shi zuo yixie shiqing zhe yangzi a. 3sg be 3sg be do some thing this manner PRT ‘“She has- she did do some work A.”’


5L:

.hhhh pt!

danshi %george-% tch! but (supervisor) ‘.hhhh pt! But %George% tch!’

6L:

ta bing bu shi:: name: %care% naxie shiqing, ni zhidao ma. 3sg actually N be that care those thing you know Q ‘he doesn’t really: %care% that: much about those things, you know?’

In TCU-Wnal position (12) (WQ 1b) ((Prior to this excerpt, speaker M, who is from Mainland China, has just informed speaker F, who is from Taiwan, that it is diYcult to cultivate rice in the northeast area of Mainland China.)) 1F:

suoyi dongbei bijiao qiong ou. = so northeast relatively poor PRT ‘So the Northeast is relatively poor?’=

2F:

=[(zhe yangzi ma) this manner Q =[‘(Is that so?)’

3M:→

=[↑dongbei bu qiong ou↑↓ northeast N poor PRT =[‘↑The Northeast is not poor OU↑↓.’

4F:

bu qiong [ma? N poor Q ‘(It’s) not [poor?’

(13) (CS Party ordinary 273a ) ((X is engaged in a word search for the name of a school.)) 1X:

na ge jiao shenme- na ge jiao shenme that C call what that C call what ‘What’s it called- What’s it called?’

2L:

banqiao na ge shi bu shi. (place) that C be N be ‘The one in Banqiao, right?’

3

(0.5)

45

46


4L:→

guangren ou (school) PRT ‘Guangren OU?’

5X:

guangren a (dui.) (school) PRT right ‘Guangren. (Right.)’

(14) (CS Party A094A) ((T is reporting on his itinerary for an upcoming trip when X joins in with a piece of information about their mutual supervisor in line 1.)) 1X:→

na ge libai laoban bu zai a. that C week boss N at PRT ‘The boss won’t be here that week A.’

2

(.)

3T:→

na ge libai laoban bu zai a) that C week boss N at PRT ‘The boss won’t be here that week A)’

4X:→

dui a.= right PRT ‘(That’s) right A.’=

To narrow the scope of analysis, the present study focuses mainly on ou and a17 in TCU-Wnal position. Final ou and Wnal a were chosen as the objects of inquiry because they are among the most frequently used in the present database. In addition, the decision to focus on the use of these two Wnal particles in TCU-Wnal position was motivated by the fact that TCU-Wnal position, as noted earlier, is a sequentially speciWable place at which speaker change may relevantly occur; hence against this position, the particle-suYxed utterances, and the use of the Wnal particles in them, can be analyzed with respect to the coparticipant’s action that follows, or with respect to its possible eventful nonoccurrence. Given, however, this delimitation of the scope of investigation, the present study makes no claims as to whether or not Wnal ou and Wnal a in non-TCUWnal position convey the same indexical meanings or perform similar interactional functions as they do in TCU-Wnal position; a fuller investigation of this topic must await future research.


2.3

Summary

This chapter has laid out the theoretical assumptions and orientations of this research, has given an overview of the database and of the transcription conventions, and has presented a new classiWcation system of Wnal particles by which the scope of the present investigation is delimited. Having addressed these theoretical and methodological preliminaries, we can now turn to the analysis of two target Wnal particles. Let us begin with Wnal ou.

Notes 1. It should be noted, however, that the term “particles” is occasionally used as a term of convenience as a substitute for the term “Wnal particles” in the present study. 2. For example, Tao (1996:52) reported that, of a total of 1284 intonation units which he had coded from three Mandarin conversations, 232 intonation units (18%) contained a Wnal particle. In addition, an informal count revealed that a Wnal particle is found, on the average, every 1.5 seconds in natural, mundane conversation in Cantonese, a dialect of the Chinese language (Luke 1990:11). In a similar count of Wnal particles in an informal Mandarin conversation, Chappell (1991:40) found that these Wnal particles occurred about every 6 seconds. 3. All of the Wnal particles in this segment have been boldfaced; an arrow is also used to alert readers to the occurrence of a Wnal particle in that speciWc line. See Section 2.2.3 and the transcription and glossing conventions provided at the beginning of this book for a more detailed explanation of the methods used in transcribing the data. 4. This excerpt will be examined in greater detail in Chapter 4 (excerpt (41)). 5. For a more detailed discussion of the related issues of “intersubjectivity,” see SchegloV 1992b. 6. See, respectively, excerpts (18) and (26) in Chapter 4. 7. The relatively infrequent occurrence of Wnal particles in written discourse has been noted in Li and Thompson 1981 and Luke 1990. 8. As this review should make clear, it is not the case that any study which uses authentic conversation as its data, or which has the goal of describing conversational uses of language, is an example of conversation analysis. The term “conversation analysis” as used here, which has sometimes been referred to as “ethnomethodological conversation analysis,” refers speciWcally to a distinctive Weld of study commonly associated with such scholars as Sacks, SchegloV, JeVerson, and others. 9. For a more complete overview, see Levinson 1983: Chapter 6; Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Heritage 1984a; C. Goodwin and Heritage 1990; Pomerantz and Fehr 1997; and SchegloV, Koshik, Jacoby and Olsher 2002, inter alia.

47

48


10. For the protection of the participants’ privacy, their names and/or initials as well as references to other people, schools, companies, etc. made in the conversations, have all been changed. 11. These conversations were collected by Qing Wang in the US and Mainland China in the summer of 1996. I thank Sandra Thompson for allowing me access to this data set. 12. Mandarin is a lingua franca in which there is wide variation in usage due to the inXuence of various dialects. For discussions of some general regional diVerences between Mandarin spoken in Mainland China and Taiwan, see, for example, Kubler 1979. 13. In a study of Taiwanese Wnal particles, I. Li’s (1999) Wndings of the functions of the Taiwanese Wnal particles a and ou parallel to a certain extent those observed to be performed by the Mandarin a and ou in the present corpus. It may be an interesting topic for future research to explore the dialectical diVerences/similarities in the use of Wnal particles in this region. 14. A small portion of the data in which the participants code-switch to Taiwanese is transcribed using the Church system, with some modiWcations (see, e.g., Cheng and Cheng 1977; I. Li 1999:1). I thank Ruey-hua Wu for her consultation on parts of the transcription. 15. A list of transcription conventions and glossing conventions employed in the transcript excerpts is provided at the beginning of this book. 16. For the purpose of consistency, the transcription as well as the glossing conventions used by Chao (1968) have been changed to those of the present study. 17. Although spelled as “a” in this study, the a particle, as Chao (1968: 803) has noted, has a number of morphophonemic alternations. This study will treat “a” and these morphophonemic alternations, such as “ia,” as the same particle.

Final ou

Chapter 3

Final ou

Chao (1968) and Li and Thompson (1981) are the only works to date that provide relatively extensive discussions of Wnal ou. Chao (ibid.) assigns two meanings to ou: (i) warning reminder, and (ii) exclamation. Li and Thompson (1981:311) characterizes ou as a “friendly warning,” which shows “concern and caring on the part of the speaker.” As we will see, while a sense of “warning” and a connotation of “friendliness” clearly Wgure in some occurrences of ou in the present corpus, these characterizations do not seem to provide a complete picture of the overall meaning and functions of this Wnal particle. Building on a previous study (Wu 1997b), I will demonstrate in this chapter that the use of Wnal ou is associated more generally with the speaker’s attempt to register an epistemic alert.1 That is, it is used either to alert the recipient to scrutinize the talk2 for that which merits special attention with respect to its epistemic status, or to display that the speaker him or herself has just undergone such a process and has just come to a newly epistemically-transformed state.3 In what follows, I will Wrst describe two types of prosodically diVerent ou particles found in the present corpus C what I will term “marked ou” and “unmarked ou.” I will then examine these two types of ou particles in Sections 3.2 and 3.3 respectively. A comparison of their functions with respect to newsmarking as well as a concluding summary will be provided in Section 3.4.

3.1

Overview

Traditionally, Wnal particles in Mandarin are diVerentiated from interjections based mainly on their prosodic and morphosyntactic diVerences. That is, although both are inherently toneless, they are diVerent from each other in two major aspects. First, while Wnal particles are unstressed, interjections are usually stressed and have deWnite intonational patterns associated with them. Second, while Wnal particles are bound, being enclitic to the preceding

49

50


morphosyntactic units, interjections are always free (Chao 1968; Li and Thompson 1981). While the discussion of Wnal particles in the literature would seem to imply that all Wnal particles are unstressed, there are, in fact, two types of phonetically distinctive ou in the present corpus; while one of them, namely unmarked ou, is produced with a Xat, low pitch, and exhibits prosodic characteristics closer to what has been described for Wnal particles in the literature, the other C marked ou C does not. In fact, these marked tokens, although prosodically bound to the immediately preceding utterances, are themselves produced with intonation contours otherwise claimed to be associated with interjections only. That is, they are produced either with a markedly high pitch, or with some kind of dynamic pitch movement, such as a rising or a falling-rising pitch contour. What is additionally noteworthy about marked ou is that it is not only prosodically “marked”; it is also “marked” in the sense that its use appears to be more restricted than its unmarked counterpart. This can be attested by the fact that the occurrences of marked tokens are far outnumbered by the unmarked tokens in the present corpus: As Table 2 demonstrates, out of a total of 205 instances of ou located in a randomly selected subset of the present corpus, 164 instances are unmarked ou and 41 instances are marked ou.4 A simple calculation reveals that the number of unmarked ou particles is four times that of marked ou. Table 2. Frequency of marked ou and unmarked ou

T-Dancer T-Number T-Stock Lady T-Telnet Tea Time Three Friends CS Party Café Total

Length of data coded

Marked ou

Unmarked ou

20’38" 1’30" 0’21" 2’47" approx. 1 hr. 40' 1 hr. 8' approx. 1 hr. 30' 1 hr. 30' approx. 6 hrs 13'

1 0 1 1 14 1 15 8 41

16 1 0 3 70 15 39 20 164

However, as Table 2 also demonstrates, despite its lower frequency, the occurrence of marked ou is clearly not an isolated linguistic phenomenon. In

Final ou

fact, as will be demonstrated later in this chapter, the distinctive intonational pattern exhibited by marked ou is interactionally relevant: It regularly invokes additional interactional imports otherwise not present in the use of unmarked ou. These interactional meanings will be further explicated in Section 3.3 of this chapter. However, Wrst let us turn to a discussion of unmarked ou.

3.2

Unmarked ou

In the present corpus, unmarked ou is regularly associated with sequences in which information management Wgures centrally. And, with only a few exceptions,5 unmarked ou occurs overwhelmingly in responsive position C most commonly, in response to prior turns at talk containing information previously unnoticed by, or unknown or newsworthy to, the recipient. This is illustrated in excerpt (1) below, drawn from a multi-party conversation among a group of friends. In this excerpt, the coparticipants are inquiring about L’s baseball-playing history. As we can note, the ou-suYxed utterance (line 10) is produced in response to L’s informing in line 9, which contains information the ou-speaker R C L’s girlfriend C later asserts to have had little knowledge of (line 13). (1) (CS Party A184A) 1W:

ni yiqian you da guo- liansai ma. you before have play ASP league Q ‘Have you played in- the baseball league?’

2W:

quanguo liansai. national league ‘The National League.’

3L:

you::. have ‘(I) did::.’

4W:

wow::. hh (exclamation) (laugh) ‘Wow::. hhh’

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52


5H:

[a nimen houlai- (.) [[you ying taiwan [[[diyiming ma PRT you later have win Taiwan champion Q [‘And did you later- (.) [[win the Taiwan [[[championship?’

6R:

[shenme shihou. what time [‘When?’

7L:

[[huh? huh [[‘Huh?’

8R:

9L:

[[[shenme shihou. what time [[[‘When?’ xiao shihou a. little time PRT ‘When I was a kid.’

10R:→ ni da guo ou. you play ASP PRT ‘You played (ball in the league) OU?/!’ 11L:

dui a. dui a. right PRT right PRT ‘(That’s) right. (That’s) right.’

12T:

%li m chai ou% you N know PRT ‘%You didn’t know?%’

13R:

[(wo zhidao ta you.) lishi hai bu zhidao I know 3sg have history still N know [‘(I know he had,) (but I) didn’t know about the history yet.’

What we can additionally note in the use of the ou-suYxed utterance in this excerpt is that the traditional characterization of ou as a friendly warning does not seem to be tenable here. Consider: As a friendly warning, it should provide the relevance of a recipient’s alignment C such as a registering of receipt of the warning, or a display of appreciation for it; or a recipient’s misalignment C such as a denying of the relevance or validity of the state of aVairs being warned against. Clearly, none of these sequentially relevant next actions for a warning are taken by the recipient, nor are their non-occurrences treated as “missing” by the ou speaker or other coparticipants in the conversation.

Final ou

Instead, we can note that, in response to the ou-suYxed utterance, the recipient produces two conWrmation tokens (dui a dui a ‘(that’s) right, (that’s) right’; line 11), thereby registering his orientation to this utterance as a request or an invitation for conWrmation. Additionally, we can note that one of the coparticipants, T, subsequently (line 12) formulates his understanding of this ou-suYxed utterance (and probably of the prior inquiry in line 6 as well) as a display of speaker R’s lack of knowledge about this particular detail in L’s baseball playing history C an understanding which is subsequently conWrmed (line 13). As I will demonstrate in the following discussion, these two properties C conWrmation-eliciting and news-indexing C are by no means unique to this particular ou-suYxed utterance. They are, rather, generic features of the use of unmarked ou, although these two properties are not exhibited concurrently in all instances. In the next section, I will examine cases in which the use of unmarked ou is mainly associated with its conWrmation-eliciting property.

3.2.1 Making conWrmation or disconWrmation relevant next “ConWrming” as a distinctive type of activity has long been recognized in the literature (e.g., Labov 1972; Labov and Fanshel 1977; Pomerantz 1980; SchegloV 1996a; Sorjonen 1997, 2001). What distinguishes “conWrming” from other types of activities, such as “aYrming” or “agreeing,” pertains mainly to the knowledge status of coparticipants toward what is at issue. Namely, by requesting conWrmation, the “requesting party” proposes that although he or she has had some grasp of the information inquired about, the recipient is the one who has the epistemic authority over its validity or adequacy. On the other hand, the recipient, in doing a conWrmation/disconWrmation, not only conWrms or disconWrms the oVered candidate understandings but also retrospectively ratiWes his or her knowledge of the prevalence of the state of aVairs in question. ConWrming and disconWrming are by no means solely accomplished through the use of Wnal particles such as ou in Mandarin. Like other languages, Mandarin also has a variety of devices which can be deployed to request (or provide) conWrmation. For example, “tag questions,” a speciWc type of question which is constructed by adding a short A-not-A question form of

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certain verbs (e.g., shi bu shi) to a statement, have been claimed to serve such a function: (2)6 (Li and Thompson 1981:546) ta zai geng tian, shi bu shi 3sg ASP plow Weld be N be ‘He is plowing the Weld, right?’

Additionally, producing a statement with a rising intonation, as in (3), or suYxing it with a Wnal particle, as in (4), has been claimed to be means by which conWrmation questions can be constructed. (3) (Li and Thompson 1981:314) ni lai? you come ‘Are you coming?’ (4) (Li and Thompson 1981:314) ni lai a? you come PRT ‘Are you coming A?’

Whereas in the literature (Chao 1968; Li and Thompson 1981; Tao 1996) only Wnal a has been noted as the Wnal particle which can be suYxed to utterances eliciting conWrmation, Wnal ou is observed to exhibit a similar function in the present corpus. Frequently, ou is found suYxed to a candidate understanding which the current speaker has formulated from a prior turn’s talk, whether it is to clarify or help clarify otherwise problematic talk, or to display a newlytransformed understanding of a state of aVairs which the speaker has just come to have. Excerpt (5) provides an instance of the former, in which the ou-suYxed utterance is used to address an understanding problem the speaker is having with talk in a prior turn. This excerpt is taken from a telephone conversation recorded in the US. In lines 1B2, L is making an assertion that one of their friends, Xiao Han, is not likely to quit his current job in the US and take a job in Taiwan because he has not had an interview with that company and does not know about the salary they may oVer him.

Final ou

(5) (T-oYcemate) 1L:

a jiranqian dou bu zhidao, PRT now-that money all N know ‘(And) now that (he) doesn’t know how much money (they will oVer),’

2L:

na xiaohan ye bu hui- zhe yang maoran jiu guoqu le a. then(person) also N ASP this way hasty then go-there CRS PRT ‘then Xiao Han is not likely to- to go take the job this hastily.’

3W:

ta keyi xianzai zou a. hhhh 3sg can now leave PRT (laugh) ‘He can leave now. hhhh’

4L:→

hui taiwan ou. return Taiwan PRT ‘Go back to Taiwan OU?’

5W:

dui a. right PRT ‘(That’s) right.’

6L:

keshi hui taiwan ni hai shi yaobut return Taiwan you still be need ‘But (if you) go back to Taiwan, you (will) still need to-’

7L:

chongxin zhao gongzuo a. again look-for job PRT ‘look for a job again.’

Note that W’s counter assertion in line 3 is ambiguous on several fronts.7 It can be understood, for example, as an assertion that this friend can quit his current job, or that he can leave for some (unspeciWed) place. Of these several possible readings, L oVers hui Taiwan ‘leaving for Taiwan’ as his candidate understanding of what W had meant to convey and suYxes it with ou (line 4). This ou-suYxed understanding check gets conWrmation as its response in the subsequent turn (line 5). Excerpt (6) provides another instance in which ou is suYxed to a candidate understanding of what the current speaker thinks the prior speaker may have intended. Here, following an earlier discussion of a private school which extends its education from kindergarten to high school, X initiates a story (line 1) about how two of their mutual friends (who are not present at

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this occasion) have been classmates since kindergarten because they went to a school of a similar type. (6) (CS Party ordinary 273a ) 1X:

haiyou nimen kan guolong gen na ge- (.) mingjie (tamen shi-) also you see (person) with that C (person) they be ‘Also, you see Guolong and that uh- (.) Mingjie. (They are-)’

2W:

henhenhen (laugh) ‘henhenhen’

3X:

yi beizi dou zai yiqi. one life all at together ‘together all their lives.’

4

(0.8)

5X:

na ge jiao shenme-na ge jiao shenme that C call what that C cal what ‘What’s it called- What’s it called?’

6L:

banqiao na ge shi bu shi. (place) that C be N be ‘The one in Banqiao, right?’

7

(0.5)

8L:→

guangren ou (school) PRT ‘Guangren OU?’

9X:

guangren a (dui.) (school) PRT right ‘Guangren. (Right.)’

10T:

(shenme) guangren? what (school) ‘(What is) Guangren?’

11X:

tamen liang guangren youzhiyuan they two (school) kindergarten ‘They both (were together) at Guangren Kindergarten.’

12

((story follows))

Final ou

As X prepares to proceed to tell the story after proVering the story preface (lines 1, 3), he exhibits diYculty in a word search of some kind (line 5). In response to the diYculty which X displays, and in the face of the ambiguity of what exactly X is searching for, L Wrst oVers a candidate referencing of the school in question by reference to its location (Banqiao) and formulates it in the form of a conWrmation question (line 6).8 Having received no uptake (line 7), L then makes a second contribution by oVering the name of the school and suYxes it with ou. This ou-suYxed oVering is subsequently conWrmed by its recipient (line 9). In the above two excerpts, the conWrmation sequences initiated by the ousuYxed utterances are both part of larger ongoing activities (i.e., challenging/ countering in (5); story-telling in (6)), which are momentarily suspended in the face of potential trouble (i.e., an understanding diYculty in (5); a word search in (6)). That is, the ou-suYxed utterances are employed to oVer a candidate resolution of the trouble at hand, which, if veriWed, will make relevant the continuation of the pending larger activities. However, seeking conWrmation (or disconWrmation) for a given state of aVairs through an ou-suYxed utterance need not be a contingent part of a larger pending activity. It can be the main action which is being accomplished. Excerpt (7) provides such an instance. Earlier in this excerpt (line 2), C proposes diYculty in recognizing a reference (to a segment of a Chinese TV show) mentioned in another coparticipant’s just-prior talk. This repair initiation is addressed by the other coparticipants through the provision of the name of the associated TV show (Meigui-Zhi-Ye; lines 5, 6), in response to which C claims a now-informed status, Wrst by an ou-initiated repeat of the repair (line 7) and then by a free-standing ou (line 10).9 The targeted ousuYxed understanding check (line 12), which contains an alternative (and a more popular) name of the TV segment at issue (Guihua-Lianpian) is launched after this repair sequence comes to a possible completion point. (7) (CS Party regular b 176) 2C:

lingyi-chuanqi? (name of a TV segment) ‘Lingyi-Chuanqi?’

3L:

[jiu shi na ge a just be that C PRT [‘Just that (TV program.)’

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58


4W:

[(YY)

5R:

mei[gui:: (part of the name of the variety show) ‘Mei[gui::’

6T:

[meigui-zhi-ye.= (name of the variety show) [‘Meigui-Zhi-Ye.’=

7C:

=[[↑ ou, meigui-zhi-ye:.= PRT (name of the variety show) =[[‘↑Oh, Meigui-Zhi-Ye:.’=

8L:

=[[<meigui-zhi-ye a> (name of the variety show) PRT =[[‘<Meigui-Zhi-Ye.>’

9L:

=dui a= right PRT =‘(That’s) right.’=

10C:

=ou::. PRT =‘Oh::.’

11

(.)

12C:→ guihua-lianpian ou. (alternative name of the TV segment) PRT ‘Guihua-Lianpian OU?’ 13L:

dui dui [dui dui dui. right right right right right ‘Right. Right. [Right. Right. Right.’

14C:

[↑ou:::: PRT [‘↑Oh::.’

Whereas the ou-suYxed utterance in line 12 is built in the form of a candidate understanding, as are the ones in (5) and (6), it is diVerent in that this utterance is produced after the speaker proposes to have come to a resolution of the trouble, namely, a recognition of the referenced TV program (line 7)

Final ou

and, by implication, the associated segment as well. What the ou-suYxed utterance is meant to accomplish here, then, is not so much establishing a common ground for the continuation of a larger activity as “double-checking” the accuracy of the grasp of the state of aVairs which the speaker now displays. A similar use of an ou-suYxed utterance is observed in excerpt (8). Prior to this segment, L has reported on how her brother, in trying to reduce her anxiety about driving his car, once told her that, even if she were hit by somebody, it would not be devastating because she would then “gain a great fortune.” This assertion is contested by W in line 1. (8)

(Tea Time sony tape2 side a 256)

1W:

ruguo ta meiyou baoxian (ni) jiu wan le. if 3sg N insurance you then die CRS ‘If he/she had no insurance, (you’d) really be in trouble.’

2F:

hen [ma PRT PRT ‘(That’s) ri[ght.’

3L:

4L:→

[you la.= have PRT [‘(He) does/did.’= =ou, ni shuo duifang [ou. PRT you say the-other-party PRT =Oh, you mean the other party [OU?’

5W:

[dui[[fang the-other-party [‘The other [[party.’

6F:

7L:

[[hen a PRT PRT [[‘Yeah.’ ou:::. PRT ‘Oh::.’

Whereas W’s use of the third person singular reference (ta ‘he/she’) in line 1 refers to the party responsible for the accident in the hypothetical scenario, L

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appears to have understood it to refer to her brother when she begins her turn in line 3 with a disagreement (you la ‘(he) does/did’). However, she immediately (line 4) revises her understanding by producing a “realizing” ou (cf. Heritage 1984b) followed by an ou-suYxed understanding check (ni shuo duifang ou ‘you mean the other party OU?’). This ou-suYxed utterance is thus similar to the one in (7) in that they are both produced after the speakers propose to have undergone a transformation of information with respect to a state of aVairs previously opaque to them; both are also built with speakers’ newly-transformed understandings of that state of aVairs, and are oVered for recipients’ veriWcation.10 Despite the diVerent sequential contexts and positions in which the ousuYxed utterances in the above excerpts occur, it is noticeable that they all get conWrmation as the response.11 This common feature suggests that the recipients seem to orient to the ou-suYxed utterances as requests or invitations for conWrmation, or more speciWcally, as inquiries which make conWrmation (or disconWrmation) relevant next.12 And such an orientation by the recipients, as we can also note, is ratiWed by the ou speakers through their subsequent moves: They either proceed to produce the pending next action and, by implication, treat the recipient’s conWrmatory response as adequate to, and suYcient for, their earlier inquiries. Or, as in (7) and (8), they receive the conWrmation with a “success marker” C a free-standing ou C which, by proposing a change in the speaker’s local state of information as a result of the response, reaYrms the status of the ou-suYxed utterance as one which is meant to request a conWrmation (or disconWrmation). However, recipients of an ou-suYxed utterance, for various interactional motivations, may not always align with its sequential implication by providing a conWrmation (or disconWrmation). And it is in these cases that the use of an ou-suYxed utterance to solicit a conWrmation (or disconWrmation) of an oVered understanding can be reinforced. Excerpt (9) is a case in point. This excerpt is taken from the end of a multiparty conversation recorded at a dinner table. Here, coparticipants H and T are co-constructing a mock complaint about how their rigorous eVorts to swim earlier that afternoon turned out to be in vain, now that they have consumed such a big meal. This sequence is brought to a possible completion with T’s remark that “(it’s) of no use at all” (line 7).

Final ou

(9) (CS Party a181b) 1T:

hui jia jiu chi ge [[ban si. return home then eat C half dead ‘(After) returning home, (we) then stuV ourselves [like mad.’

2H:

[[jiu chi de geng duo= then eat CSC even more [‘Then eat even more.’=

3H:

=[hhhh (laugh) =[‘hhhh’

4

=[((people laugh))

5T:

=[jia qilai jiu shi quanbu de. add up then be all PRT =‘(What we’ve consumed) is equal to all (that we’ve exhausted in swimming.)’

6

((people laugh))

7T:

yidian yong dou meiyou. a-little use all N ‘(It’s) of no use at all.’

8

(1.0)

9L:→

ou, ni youyong shi yao jianfei de ou. PRT you swim be want lose-weight PRT PRT ‘Oh, (the reason) you swim is because you want to lose weight OU?’

10C:

hhhhhh (laugh) ‘hhhh’

11L:

shi ma. haishi zai yundong. be Q or ASP exercise ‘Is (that) so? Or were (you just) exercising?’

12

((tape interrupted for a second))

13C:

tamen dou shi wei tamen dudu zhaoxiang. they all be for their tummy consider ‘They’ve all been swimming for the sake of their tummies.’

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62


Whereas T does not explicate what “of no use” speciWcally refers to in his remark, L, who had not joined them to go swimming, shows his understanding of it as an allusion to losing weight and formulates that as his understanding in the form of an ou-suYxed utterance in the next turn (line 9). Note Wrst that, unlike the other ou-suYxed utterances examined so far, this ou-suYxed understanding is not met with recipient conWrmation but is responded to with laugh tokens by a non-addressed party (line 10). Note additionally that, in the face of this equivocal response, what L does next C instead of receiving the response with ou (cf. (7), (8)) C is to launch two subsequent conWrmation questions (line 11), which eventually “succeed” (albeit still responded to by the non-addressed coparticipant). These further pursuits of response by L to his original inquiry underscore that this ousuYxed utterance is not oVered merely as his displayed understanding of the matter at issue, but as one that invites minimally a conWrmation or disconWrmation as its response. Excerpt (10), from a telephone conversation, oVers another example. Immediately preceding this excerpt, L has just given an update on one of their mutual friends, who has recently been oVered a job by a company in the US. In lines 1B2, L seeks to obtain more information about this company from U, who has been working in the same Weld as this friend and has shown recognition of the name of this company in the immediately preceding exchange. (10) (T-Career 101) 1L:

na shi yi ge hen hao de gongsi ma. shenme ziliao ou. what data PRT ‘What data OU?’ 6Y:3→ hen. PRT ‘Yeah.’ 7R:

jiushi- women jiushi ba ta yi ge zi yi ge zi xie xialai. that-is we that-is BA it one C word one C word write down ‘That is just- We’ll just transcribe word by word.’

Notice that these two types of repeat-formatted repair initiators (arrow 2), like the majority of cases in the corpus, are treated diVerently by the recipients (arrow 3): The question-intoned repeat in (13) is addressed by recipients’ provision of related information about the referent (i.e., the name of the associated TV show), thereby embodying an analysis of it as a recognition or understanding problem. On the other hand, the ou-suYxed repeat in (14) gets a conWrmation (hen ‘yeah’; line 6) as its response, which suggests that it is understood as an understanding check. Therefore, although in both cases the speakers initiate repair on the preceding talk through a partial repeat, a “bare” repeat with a question intonation is heard as the speaker’s non-comprehension of the repeated element; with an ou-suYxing, however, the repeated element is not treated as what the speaker proposes to not comprehend, but as what he or she proposed as his or her candidate understanding/hearing of the trouble source turn. On the basis of these two sorts of evidence, namely, candidate understandings and repeat-formatted repair initiators with or without an ousuYxing, it becomes clear that what Wnal ou indexes is a speaker’s commitment to having come to some grasp of a state of aVairs, while at the same time displaying an epistemic reservation about it. And as I shall suggest, it is the invocation of this kind of epistemic stance through the use of Wnal ou that makes conWrmation or disconWrmation a relevant next action. In the next section, we will turn to another use of unmarked ou C i.e., registering a news receipt C which appears to exhibit a similar stance of expressing an epistemic reservation about the speaker’s newly-acquired information.

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3.2.3 Registering a news receipt In the previous section, we have examined cases in which ou is suYxed to a candidate understanding which the speaker has formulated from another’s earlier talk. As we have also seen, such ou-suYxed utterances regularly serve as understanding checks, which are heard as sequentially implicating a conWrmation (or disconWrmation) by the recipient in the next turn. In the cases that we have seen so far, seeking a conWrmation (or disconWrmation) of a candidate understanding seems to be the primary15 task that the speakers intend to accomplish through an ou-suYxed utterance; however, there is a substantial number of cases in which it is evident that the ou-suYxed utterances are not employed merely to request conWrmation; they also display a stance of surprise on the part of the speakers toward that which they have just come to understand. Frequently, such a display of surprise is associated with the fact that prior turns at talk contained information previously unknown, unexpected, and therefore newsworthy to the recipient. In some cases, the “newsworthy” status of the prior talk is subsequently overtly registered by the ou speaker C commonly through an acknowledgment that he or she was previously uninformed or misinformed about the matter at hand. This can be illustrated by the following two excerpts, both taken from the same multi-party conversation among a group of friends. In excerpt (15), R is talking about cram schools in Taiwan which teach prospective emigrants how to make popular Taiwanese foods sold at night markets. In (16), the talk has turned to a big purchase of vitamin supplements made by coparticipant T C a topic which had already been brought up earlier in this conversation. (15) (CS Party A081B; video 52’20”)

1R:

2C:

[((looking at C and sustaining mutual gazes with her in lines 1B3)) bu shenme- %bi ke% a [(Y.) cram what (food) PRT ‘They teach (people) how to make %bi ke% [(Y)’ [ou ou ou ↑zhende PRT PRT PRT really [‘Oh, oh, oh. ↑Really.’

Final ou

3R:

you buxiban= have cram-school ‘There are cram schools.’=

4X:

=ou. PRT =‘Oh.’

5T:

6R:

[((R turning gaze toward T)) hh zhen::de (a). (laugh) really PRT ‘hhh Really::!’ ((nods, smiling))

[((R turning gaze back to C)) 7C:1→ *you buxiban ou. have cram-school PRT ‘There are cram schools OU?’ 8R:2→ ((nods, smiling)) 9C:3→ wo shi bu xiaode.* ((* to * smile voice)) I be N know ‘(That) I didn’t know.’ (16) (CS Party ordinary 1A-394; video 33') 1W:

a hhh ni shangci mai wu hhh guan PRT(laugh) you last-time buy Wve (laugh) bottle ‘Then hhh last time you bought Wve hhh bottles.’

2W:

ni zheci you mai ershiwu guan.hhhh you this-time again buy twenty-Wve bottle (laugh) ‘This time you bought another twenty-Wve bottles. hhh’

3T:

[wo [[zheci mai ershi I this-time buy twenty [‘I [[bought twenty this time.’

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72


4C:

5L:

[er- [[ershi guan. twenty bottle [‘Twen- [[twenty bottles.’ [((looking at T)) [[keshi nabut then [[‘But then-’

6X:

ou:::. PRT ‘Oh::.’

7W:

[hhhhh (laugh) [‘hhhh’

8L:1→

[((T turning gaze at L)) [ershi guan ou twenty bottle PRT [‘Twenty bottles OU?’

9T:2→ ((nods)) 10L:3→ wo yiwei ni mai ershi kuai. wo ganggang- (.) mei ting qingchu. I thought you buy twenty dollar I just-now N hear clear ‘I thought you bought twenty dollars. I didn’t hear it clearly earlier.’

In each case, we can note that while the ou-suYxed utterance (arrow 1), like those observed in Section 3.2.1, is subsequently conWrmed by its recipient (arrow 2), its use here clearly involves more than a straightforward conWrmation request. The fact that, following the recipient conWrmation, the ou speaker moves (arrow 3) to claim a prior uninformed (i.e., (15)) or misinformed (i.e., (16)) status about the matter at hand suggests that the production of the ou-suYxed utterance in each case is not merely repair-implicated; it also serves to mark the matter being addressed as news for the ou speaker. In other cases, it is the recipients’/coparticipants’ orientation to ou-suYxed utterances that gives support to the claim that the deployment of an ousuYxed utterance may embody the speaker’s treatment of the matter being responded to as newsworthy. This, as may be recalled, was shown in the earlier examined excerpt (1): In that excerpt about L’s baseball-playing history, we noted that the ou-suYxed utterance is taken (correctly) by one coparticipant as the ou speaker’s display of a prior lack of knowledge about this particular

Final ou

matter. A similar phenomenon can be observed in excerpt (17) below, where a group of college friends are updating one another on changes in their lives. (17) (Café R037a) 1L:

women xianzai bu tong xiao. wo xianzai zai gaozhong a we now N same school I now at senior-high PRT ‘We are not at the same school now. I (teach) at a senior high now.’

2

(.)

3M:=>

ou, ni pao dao gaozhong qu le [ou. PRT you run to senior-high go CRS PRT ‘Oh, you’ve transferred to a senior high [OU?’

4L:

[qisu gaozhong. (school) senior-high [‘Qisu Senior High.’

5L:

[(Y) cai qu yi nian eryi la. only go one year only PRT [‘(..) only transferred there a year ago.’

6Y:=>

[ni bu xiaode ou. [[wo meiyou gaosu ni ma. you N know PRT I N tell you Q [‘You didn’t know OU?/! [[Didn’t I tell you?’

7M:→

[[wo bu zhidao (a). I N know PRT [[‘I had no idea.’

Here, in response to L’s informing in line 1, M initiates an ou-suYxed utterance (line 3).16 This ou-suYxed utterance, like that in (1), is understood as the speaker’s display of a prior lack of access to the matter at hand. This understanding is not only formulated explicitly (ni bu xiaode ou ‘You didn’t know OU’; line 6) by coparticipant Y in a turn following the conWrmation; that formulated understanding is also subsequently conWrmed by the speaker of the ou-suYxed utterance (wo bu zhidao (a) ‘I had no idea’; line 7). It is worth noting that, in proVering her understanding of the import of M’s prior ou-suYxed utterance, Y herself deploys the practice of ou-suYxing (line 6). In addition, this ou-suYxed candidate understanding is followed by a negatively-formulated question (wo mei gaosu ni ma ‘didn’t I tell you?’), delivered with a tone of puzzlement and a shade of challenge. What these

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observations suggest, then, is that M’s displayed lack of information about this mutual friend’s job change C adumbrated by her use of an unmarked ou (line 3) C is something that Y did not expect and hence marks with an ou (line 6). This excerpt therefore nicely illustrates how conversational coparticipants may orient themselves to the “newsmarking” function of unmarked ou, and how they themselves may use this particle as a “newsmark” (JeVerson 1981; Heritage 1984b) when prior speakers’ newsmarking stances are unexpected or problematic to them. In still other cases, the “newsworthy” quality of prior talk is implicated in speakers’ aVect displays after their oVered understandings have been conWrmed or disconWrmed. Excerpts (18) and (19) provide two such instances. In (18), three graduate students (W, F, and R) from diVerent universities in the US are talking about how many units they need to take in order to be full-time students. After W and F have learned from each other that both of their minimal requirements are nine units, W directs an inquiry about this issue to R in line 1. In (19), the coparticipants are inquiring about which course coparticipant L, who had just obtained his Ph.D., will be teaching for his Wrst job at a university. In both excerpts, after the inquiries are addressed and clariWed, one of the coparticipants initiates an ou-suYxed understanding check (arrow 1) on the just-clariWed matter, which is subsequently conWrmed by its recipient (arrow 2). (18) (Tea Time s2B277a) 1W:

ei ni ye shi ma. hou? ((to R)) PRT you also be PRT PRT ‘Hey, you too (need to take nine units), right?’

2F:

[dui a. right PRT [‘(That’s) right.’

3R:

[wo shier. I twelve [‘I (need) twelve (units.)’

4W:1=> yao shier ge ou. need twelve C PRT ‘(You) need twelve units OU?’

Final ou

5F:1=> nimen zhishao yao xiu shier ou you at-least need take-class twelve PRT ‘You need to take at least twelve units OU?’ 6R:2→ dui a. right PRT ‘(That’s) right.’ 7F:3→ hang::. (exclamation) ‘Hang::.’ (19) (CS Party 304) 1W:

ta yao shang %assembly%.= ((to H, in the kitchen)) 3sg (L) ASP teach (course) ‘He’ll teach %Assembly.%’=

2T:

=%assembly%. (course) =‘%Assembly.%’

3W:

hhhhhh (laugh) ‘hhhhh’

4X:1=> ni yao shang %assembly% ou you ASP teach (course) PRT ‘You’ll teach %Assembly% OU?’ 5L:2→

°(dui.)°

right ‘(°Right.°)’ 6X:3→ aiyou. hen nan ou↑ (exclamation) very diYcult PRT ‘Aiyou. (It’s) very diYcult.’

Note here that, following the recipients’ provision of the conWrmation, the speakers do not propose a change of state of information through an ou receipt, but rather display a stance of surprise toward the reconWrmed state of aVairs in each case through an aVect marker (arrow 3: hang in (18); aiyou in (19)).17 Just as an ou receipt in the third position of such conWrmation sequences can retrospectively mark the prior ou-suYxed utterance as a request for conWrmation or disconWrmation and nothing more than a request for

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conWrmation or disconWrmation (e.g., (7), (8)), so too do the aVect markers deployed here appear to index that the previous ou-suYxed inquiries are surprise-implicated. Indeed, a closer look at these two excerpts shows that the speakers’ displayed surprise can be understood with reference to a sense of unexpectedness regarding what they have just been informed of. In (18), such unexpectedness comes from an otherwise held assumption that R should have the same course requirements as W and F C an assumption which is clearly encoded into the design of W’s question (line 1) and the response F provides on behalf of R (line 2). In (19), the fact that L has been assigned to teach this speciWc course is more than expected because, as reXected in X’s debrieWng following his aVect display (line 6), it may be too challenging for a novice teacher. Therefore, what we Wnd in excerpts (15)B(19) is that, despite the similarities which these ou-suYxed utterances share with those discussed in Section 3.2.1 in terms of their design and the response they receive (i.e., a conWrmation), they appear to be deployed to quite diVerent eVect: As evidenced by the speakers’ and/or the coparticipants’ subsequent reactions, the use of these ou-suYxed utterances involves not only an attempt to seek ratiWcation of the proVered understandings; it also involves a stance display C a display that the matter being addressed is newsworthy to the ou speaker. However, just as an ou-suYxed utterance can be intended and taken as a straightforward conWrmation request, with no speciWc aVect display involved, so too, can it be produced and heard as a straightforward aVect display, for which no subsequent conWrmation is necessary. Consider, for example, excerpts (20) and (21) below. In (20), the ousuYxed utterance (arrow 1) is found in a turn which occurs in the third position of a question-answer-receipt sequence (lines 3B5) initiated in response to coparticipant T’s informing about a plane ticket he had just purchased (lines 1B2). In (21), the ou-suYxed utterance (arrow 1) is used in response to a question-elicited informing regarding how long it will still take R to obtain her doctoral degree. (20) (CS Party A23A) 1T:

wo zhi wen le diyi jia. kI only ask PFV the-Wrst C ‘I only asked one (travel agency) b-’

Final ou

2T:

juede pianyi wo jiu yijing mai le. feel cheap I then already buy PFV/CRS ‘(I) thought (the ticket was) cheap, (so I) already bought (it).’

3L:

duoshao qian. how-much money ‘How much?’

4T:

wu bai bashi wu. Wve hundred eighty Wve ‘Five hundred eighty-Wve.’

5L:1=> wow, name pianyi ou. (exclamation) that cheap PRT ‘Wow, that cheap OU?/!’ 6L:2→

na yi jia. which one C ‘Which one?’

7T:

gujiang. (local travel agency) ‘Gujiang.’

(21) (Tea time: sony tape2 side b 096) 1L:

dagai hai yao duojiu. probably still need how-long ‘How long will it still probably take (you to obtain your Ph.D.)?’

2

(0.5)

3R:

yi liang nian ba. one two year PRT ‘Probably one to two years.’

4L:1=> ↑hai yao yi liang nian ou. still need one two year PRT ‘↑(It’ll) still take one to two years OU?/!’ 5R:

[hhhhhhhhhh (laugh) [‘hhhhhhhhhhhh’

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78


6L:2→

[↑zeme nian name jiu ne.= how-come study that long-time PRT [‘↑How come (you’ve been) studying so long?/!’=

7F:

=hhhhh (laugh) =‘hhhhh’

Notice that both of the ou-suYxed utterances here are highly aVectivelyloaded and assessment-laden: The one in (20) contains an upgraded assessment (i.e., upgraded from pianyi ‘cheap’ in line 2 to name pianyi ‘that cheap’ in line 5) and is itself prefaced with a “response cry” (GoVman 1981), i.e., an exclamation wow; the one in (21) is produced with a higher pitch (marked by “↑” in the transcript) with the assessment descriptor hai ‘still’ stressed. The aVect displayed in and through the prosodic features and lexical selection of these ou-suYxed utterances clearly underscores the speakers’ treatment of the information just delivered as newsworthy. Yet, unlike the other cases in this section, the two ou-suYxed utterances here receive no conWrmation (or disconWrmation) as responses: They are either oriented to by the recipient as not response-relevant, as in (20), where no vocal or non-vocal response is provided, or met with laughter (line 5, (21)), which seems deployed to show the recipient’s understanding of, and alignment with, the aVective stance built into the ou-suYxed utterance. In addition, in contrast with excerpts (9) and (10), the non-occurrence of a conWrmation (or disconWrmation) in these two excerpts is not treated as sequentially eventful, nor does it engender another round of pursuit of response. Instead, the speakers’ subsequent moves to launch another question (arrow 2) without awaiting provision of a response by the recipients18 suggest that these two ou-suYxed utterances are produced straightforwardly as aVect displays. Despite the diVerence in the way they are responded to, what holds across the ou-suYxed utterances in excerpts (15)B(21) is their association with a speaker’s stance display. This display shows that the upshot of the immediately preceding sequence of talk C which may or may not19 be (re)formulated in the ou-suYxed utterance C constitutes news for the speaker of the ousuYxed utterance. As we have also seen, such a “news-receipt” implication can not only be subsequently registered by its speaker and/or conversational coparticipants (e.g., (15), (16), (17)); it can also be invoked through a speaker’s

Final ou

subsequent aVect display (e.g., (18), (19)) as well as through the design of ousuYxed utterances (e.g., (20), (21)).

3.2.4 ConWrmation requests or news receipts? In the previous two sections, I have shown that making a conWrmation (or disconWrmation) relevant next and registering a news receipt are two functions commonly performed by ou-suYxed utterances. However, it is important to note that the mere occurrence of a Wnal ou does not in itself signal whether the utterance to which it attaches implicates a conWrmation request, a news receipt, or both. Although frequently how an ou-suYxed utterance should be understood can be made clear through contextual resources, there are occasions when potential ambiguity arises and the issue of which of the readings is to be made of the ou-suYxed utterance becomes an object of negotiation in the course of interaction. This is illustrated by the following excerpt. In lines 1B3, X is Wnishing up his report that food stands selling very common Taiwanese desserts at night markets can be sold at a surprisingly high price. (22)(CS Party a079b) 1X:

xiang na ge shenme- %ba goan% a, shenme na zhong- (.) like that C what (food) PRT what that C ‘Like what’s-that- %ba goan%, or stuV like tha- (.)’

2X:

jushuo na ge yi ge tan- (.) I-heard that C one C stand ‘I heard that (just) a stand (selling) that kind of food- (.)’

3X:

lian na ge- peifang shenme de, mai wu-bai-wan. include that C seasonings what PRT sell Wve-million ‘including that uh- menu or what, is worth Wve million (NT) dollars.’

4

(.)

5L:=>

↑hhhang? wu-bai-wan ou (exclamation) Wve-million PRT ‘↑hhang? Five million (NT) dollars OU?/!’

6

(0.2)

79

80


7X:→

[yi ge tanwei zhe yang. one C stand this manner [‘Just a stand like this.’

8L:→

[%ou: god% PRT god [‘%Oh: God.%’

9C:

hou, zhende. (exclamation) really ‘Hou, really.’

Here, after a slight delay (line 4) following X’s report, L launches a turn (in line 5), which contains two turn-constructional units (Sacks, SchegloV, and JeVerson 1974) C a stance marker delivered with a high pitch (i.e., hang) and an ousuYxed (partial) repeat. Notice Wrst that this turn is followed by a silence (line 6). Notice also that X and L begin a turn simultaneously following the silence (i.e., in lines 7 and 8 respectively). What is of particular interest here is that the silence with its sequential positioning, namely, in a turn following an ou-suYxed utterance, seems to embody a diVerence in X’s and L’s initial interpretations of the ou-suYxed utterance. On the one hand, by not immediately providing a conWrmation (or disconWrmation), X shows himself to have heard the ou-suYxed utterance as a straightforward aVect display. On the other, by doing nothing other than waiting, L seems to display an orientation to the ou-suYxed utterance as sequentially implicating a conWrmation (or disconWrmation) which is yet to be provided. Despite the diVerence in how the ou-suYxed utterance was understood initially, the two participants appear to align with the other party’s previous interpretation in their subsequent moves. In line 7, X proceeds to reconWrm the substance of his prior report while L is launching a newsmark (line 8) C this time a straightforward aVect display. A return to excerpt (9), reproduced below, provides us with another example. (9) (CS Party a181b) 5T:

=[jia qilai jiu shi quanbu de. add up then be all PRT =‘(What we’ve consumed) is equal to all (that we’ve exhausted in swimming).’

Final ou

6

((people laugh))

7T:

yidian yong dou meiyou. a:little use all N ‘(It’s) of no use at all.’

8

(1.0)

9L:→

ou, ni youyong shi yao jianfei de ou. PRT you swim be want lose-weight PRT PRT ‘Oh, (the reason) you swim is because you want to lose weight OU?’

10C:

hhhhhh (laugh) ‘hhhh’

11L:

shi ma. haishi zai yundong. be Q or ASP exercise ‘Is (that) so? Or were (you just) exercising?’

12

((tape interrupted for a second))

13C:

tamen dou shi wei tamen dudu zhaoxiang. they all be for their tummy consider ‘They’ve all been swimming for the sake of their tummies.’

In this instance, as in (22), a discrepancy between the speaker’s and the recipient’s analysis of the ou-suYxed utterance (line 9) is made evident through the subsequent moves of the participants: On the one hand, the lack of a response by the intended recipient, T, and the deployment of a stance marker (i.e., laugh tokens in line 10) by coparticipant C display a potentially similar orientation to L’s ou-suYxed understanding, namely, an orientation to it as an aVect display. On the other hand, L’s subsequent attempts to pursue a response (line 11) retrospectively mark the status of this ou-suYxed understanding as an inquiry which requires minimally a conWrmation or disconWrmation as its response. Thus, whereas in (22) the speaker of the ou-suYxed utterance proceeds to align with the recipient’s initial interpretation of it, in (9) the speaker moves to “get straight” an otherwise problematic hearing of his ou-suYxed utterance. As these two excerpts demonstrate, although an ou-suYxed utterance may serve as a conWrmation request or an aVect display, Wnal ou in itself does not disambiguate one reading from another. Rather, which of the two read-

81

82


ings is to be foregrounded in the local sequential context can sometimes be a matter of further negotiation among coparticipants in conversation.

3.2.5 Summary of unmarked ou In this section, we have looked at unmarked ou in its prototypical position, namely, attached to an utterance that is produced in responsive position. As we have seen, utterances suYxed with unmarked ou convey very diVerent import from that conveyed by utterances without ou-suYxing; and these ousuYxed utterances generally perform two functions: soliciting recipient conWrmation (or disconWrmation), and registering a news receipt. That is, they may be used to clarify what another has just said or intended in a preceding turn (or turns), or their uses may indicate that the prior talk by another contains information previously unknown, unexpected, and hence newsworthy to the ou speakers. These two functions, as we have also noted, are not mutually exclusive and may, on occasion, appear equivocal to the parties in a conversation, for both functions share the similarity of adumbrating an epistemic reservation on the part of the speaker toward what he or she has just come to understand, and both are marked by the use of unmarked ou.

3.3

Marked ou: “There is more here than meets the eye!”

Thus far in this chapter, we have focused on the use of unmarked ou. In this section, we turn to another type of prosodically diVerent ou C namely, marked ou. Let me begin by noting that while marked ou is similar to a large number of unmarked tokens in the present corpus in exhibiting an intrinsic “newsmarking” property C i.e., marking the information at issue as newsworthy C marked ou does not adumbrate an epistemically weakened stance on the part of the speaker. Consider, for example, the use of marked ou in excerpt (23) below, which is taken from a multi-party conversation among a group of friends, recorded in the US. Immediately preceding this excerpt, C, a female visitor to the US, has reported that H and W have shown her around and have always taken her along with them whenever they went on a trip. This excerpt begins with L’s

Final ou

inquiry about whether they also took her with them on an extended trip to Las Vegas. (23) (CS Party 190) 1L:

ei, shangci canPRT last-time ‘Hey, last time-’

2L:

nimen qu lasiweijiasi you hhh rang ta qu?= ((to W)) you go (place) have (laugh) let 3sg go ‘(did you) let her hhh follow you (when) you guys went to Las Vegas?’=

3C:

=you. hhhh have (laugh) =‘(They) did. hhh’

4L:

you ma. have Q ‘(You) did?’

5?:

.hhhhh (inbreath) ‘.hhhhh’

6W:

na yi ci. h[hh[[hhhhhh which one C (laugh) ‘When? h[hh[[h’

7C:

8L:

((to W))

[hh[[hhhh (laugh) [‘hh[[hhh’ [[qu san tian ban de nago three day half PRT that [[‘Three and a half days-’

9L:

san tian duo de (na yi ci) three day more PRT that one C ‘When (you) went for more than three days.’

10C:

san tian duo de na yi ci? three day more PRT that one C ‘More than three days?’

83

84


11C:→

↑meiyou ou↑[:: N PRT ‘↑No:: OU↑[:::.’

12L:

[meiyou (le:) ((in a playful tone)) N ASP [‘No.’

13C:

[hou↑20::::: ni meiyou dai wo qu. (exclamation) you N take I go [‘Hoh↑:::: You didn’t take me there.’

14H:

[you ma. (0.2) wo conglai meiyou qu guo name jiu. have Q I never N go ASP that long-time [‘Did (we/I)? (0.2) I’ve never been there that long.’

15

(.)

16

((people laugh))

17C:

qu name jiu deshihou jiu bu dai wo qu. go that long-time when then N take I go ‘When (you) went for that long, (you) just didn’t take me.’

Without going into great detail about this sequence,21 I would like to register two points relevant to our discussion of marked ou. First, the marked ou in this excerpt (at the arrow) is produced in a turn following a clariWcation sequence (lines 6–9) which conveys information contrastive with what the ou speaker, C, has previously asserted (line 3) (i.e., that there is at least one trip which C is uninformed of and was not invited to); and hence, this marked ou, like the unmarked tokens examined in Section 3.2.3, seems produced to register the “unexpected” and “newsworthy” character of the prior turn’s talk. Second, while the production of this marked ou is closely associated with the speaker’s receipt of a piece of information previously unknown to her, registering a news receipt does not seem to be the only action accomplished here. Considering, Wrst, the ou speaker’s subsequent moves – proVering negative observations (ni meiyou dai wo qu ‘You didn’t take me there’; qu name jiu deshihou jiu bu dai wo qu ‘When (you) went for that long, (you) just didn’t take me’; lines 13, 17) – which is common practice for the accomplishment of complaining (SchegloV 1988), and considering, second, the recipient’s subsequent responses (you ma? wo conglai meiyou qu guo name jiu ‘Did (we/I)? I’ve never been there that long’; line 14), which are hearably a denial of the

Final ou

“accusable,” it is clear that marking a news receipt through a marked ou here appears to be done in the service of lodging a complaint. As I will demonstrate below, this process of accomplishing additional interactional work through newsmarking is not limited to excerpt (23), but is a regular feature of marked ou. More speciWcally, I will demonstrate that the use of marked ou – whether in Wrst position (Section 3.3.1) or in responsive position (Section 3.3.2) in a sequence C regularly invokes an “emphatic” reading of the “newsmarking” property: It is either to emphasize the “extraordinary” character of a state of aVairs, or to alert the recipient to some additional – and commonly negatively-valenced – interactional work that the speaker is attempting to accomplish in the local conversational environment.

3.3.1 In Wrst position Unlike unmarked ou, whose occurrences are highly restricted to responsive position in a sequence, marked ou is commonly located in both responsive position and Wrst position. When produced in Wrst position, marked ou regularly occurs as part of a turn in which informing, reporting, or story-telling is underway. In these cases, marked ou is frequently attached to an utterance which either serves as the punchline of a story, or conveys information crucial for grasping what is to be projected as the punchline. This can be illustrated in excerpt (24), in which speaker W is talking about a car accident she recently had. (24) (Tea Time sony 2A-214) 1W:

hao haoxiao de shi wo hai mei jiang wan. zai zhe ge shihou (.) very funny PRT thing I yet N say Wnish at this C time (One more) funny thing. I’m not Wnished yet. At this time (.)’

2W:

wo dou dai taiyang yanjing ma, I all wear sun glasses PRT ‘I normally wore sunglasses,’

3W:

yinwei w- yanjing- shizai- shou bu liao because eye really bear N able ‘because my- eyes- really- can’t tolerate.’

4W:→

<wo dou- wo you dai taiyang yanjing ou↑ I all I have wear sun glasses PRT ‘

[wu-qing a (name) PRT [‘Wu Qing A.’

10X:=>

[[wu-qing a (name) PRT [[‘Wu Qing A.’

11L:

[[ changchang qu zhao ta. (name) have one C girlfriend often go visit 3sg [[‘ (who) goes to visit him very often.’

12X:

3sg have one C admirer PRT ‘’

13H:→

ou, na ge- [wu-qing la.= PRT that C (name) PRT ‘Oh. That(’s)- [Wu Qing.’=

((in the kitchen at the moment))

((to X))

Here, H’s repair initiator in line 7 (shei ‘who’) generates two rounds of responses from the recipients: the Wrst round by X (line 9), produced in overlap with T’s conWrmation request (line 8), and the second round by X (line 10) and L (line 11), produced in overlap with each other. Of these responses, we can note that the two responses by X C his initial one in line 9 and the

Final a 187

subsequent reproduction in line 10 C are both suYxed with a. X’s consistent C and insistent C deployment of a-suYxing to his responses appears to embody his treatment of H’s question as counter-to-expectation, possibly on the ground of H’s presumed prior knowledge about the matter under discussion. And indeed, this a-embodied supposition is subsequently conWrmed. In line 13, we can see that, following the production of a “realizing” ou and a brief word search (na ge- (‘that(’s)-’), H not only displays that he has indeed known about this mutual friend’s recent romance, but does so through a display of that knowledge C i.e., by specifying the woman’s name. Excerpts (27) through (31), then, show how the practice of a-suYxing can serve to adumbrate the question recipient’s assumption that the questioner should have known what he or she has just inquired about. And in each of these cases, this assumption appears to turn on some ethnographic or personal knowledge shared by the questioner and the question recipient. However, a supposition of this kind may also turn on knowledge directly obtained from the local sequential context. That is, a question recipient may a-suYx his or her response if the question is, in his or her view, inquiring into information already conveyed in the prior sequence. It comes as no surprise, then, that one of the most frequent sequential contexts used for Wnal a is in a turn of (re)conWrmation. This use of Wnal a is illustrated by the following excerpts, all from the earlier-cited examples in this chapter.43 (1) (CS Party A094A) 1X:→1

na ge libai laoban bu zai a. that C week boss N at PRT ‘The boss won’t be here that week.’

2

(.)

3T:→2

na ge libai laoban bu zai a) that C week boss N at PRT ‘The boss won’t be here that week?’

4X:=>3

dui a.= right PRT ‘(That’s) right A.’=

188 Final Particles in Mandarin

(5) (T-Dancer 211) 1D:→1

jieguo renjia gen wo shuo ta shi waishengren= result others with I say 3sg be mainlander ‘And then (when) other people told me that she is a mainlander,’=

2D:

=wo- (.) wo (ziji) dou xia yi tiao a= I I self all shock one C PRT =‘I- (.) I (myself) was shocked.’ =

3X:→2

=ta shi waishengren a) 3sg be mainlander PRT =‘She is a mainlander?’

4D:=>3

dui a right PRT ‘(That’s) right A.’

(6) (CS Party A119b) 1C:→1

ta zai taiwan shuo: na ge: (.) jiaru na ge quanlijin a 3sg at Taiwan say that C join that C franchise-fee PRT ‘In Taiwan they said: that uh:: (.) the franchise fee,’

2L:

[hen PRT [‘Yeah?’

3X:

[uh PRT [‘Uh.’

4C:→1

haoxiang bu shi hen gao a= seem N be very high PRT ‘doesn’t seem very high.’=

5X:→2

=quanlijin bu gui a) franchise-fee N expensive PRT =‘The franchise fee is not expensive?’

6C:=>3

dui a tingshuo qishi bu gao. right PRT I-heard actually N high ‘(That’s) right A. (I) heard (them) say (it’s) actually not high.’

Final a 189

(23) (T-career 108) 1L:

pt! hhhh aaxiang nimen zuo de zhe ge dongxi PRT PRT like you do PRT this C stuV ‘pt! hhhh And- and- like the stuV that you are making,’

2L:

zai taiwan you mei you ren zai zuo a) at Taiwan have N have person ASP do PRT ‘is there anyone making (it) in Taiwan?’

3L:

<wo shuo xiang:: xinzhu kexue yuanqu. I say like (place) science center ‘3


(29) (CS Party 216A) 1R:

shenme shihou. what time ‘When?’

2L:→1

xiao shihou a. little time PRT ‘When (I) was a kid.’


3R:→2

ni da guo ou. you play ASP PRT ‘You played (ball in the league)?/!’

4L:=>3

dui a. dui a. right PRT right PRT ‘(That’s) right A. (That’s) right A.’

In each of these excerpts, we can see that the a speaker’s just-prior informing or assertion (arrow 1) is met with a query (arrow 2), which, in turn, receives an a-suYxed (re)conWrmation (arrow 3). In view of its sequential position, the query C whether it turns out to be a (straightforward) repair initiator, a predisagreement or a newsmark C is, at the moment of its production, vulnerable to the analysis by its recipient that it is questioning the obvious C something that he or she has just articulated or conveyed. And I suggest that it is just this kind of analysis and an intent to register this analysis that lead the recipient to a-suYx his or her subsequent (re)conWrmation. Excerpt (33) oVers another example of (re)conWrmation suYxed with Wnal a. In this example, however, the locus of the presumably shared knowledge is not located in the sequence in which the a-suYxed (re)conWrmations are deployed, but rather occurred further back in the conversation. This earlier conversation is presented in excerpt (32), below. (32) (CS Party ordinary 183A; sony 210A; video 19:20) 1X:

houlai shaobang you jiang shenme hua ma? later little-league have speak what word Q ‘Did (they) talk about anything else later in (today’s) Little League?’

2?:

(Y)

3H:

haoxiang meiyou (nei). seem N PRT ‘(I) suppose not.’

4L:

tch! shenme shiqing. what matter ‘tch! What’s up?’

5X:

ying [(le) a win CRS PRT ‘(We) [won.’

Final a

6H:

[jintian- <shaobang %li kam-u khoaN% today little-league you Q see [‘%Did you watch% today’s-


6W?:

[jintiantoday [‘Today-’

7L:

[(ye shi) lide. also be (school) [‘(The team is also from) Lide./?’

8L:→

jintian da le= today play PFV/CRS ‘(It’s) already been played today?’=

9X:=>

=(jintian)/(yijing) da wan le a today already play Wnish PFV/CRS PRT =‘(It’s) (already) Wnished (today) A.’

10L:

ou. PRT ‘Oh.’

11

(.)

12L:

wo zhidao qingbang guanjun le ma.= I know major-league champion PFV/CRS PRT ‘I knew (we’d) won the championship for the Major League.’=

13L:

=[shaobanglittle-league =[‘The Little League-’

14W:

=[shaobang ye shi guanjun. little-league also be champion =[‘(We’ve) also won the championship for the Little League.’

Final a 193

Here, we can note that L’s conWrmation request in line 4 (women na ge shaobang shi- shijie guanjun le ‘our Little League team has (won) the worworld championship?’) and the subsequent one in line 8 (jintian da le ‘(it’s) already been played today?’) each attract an a-suYxed response from a diVerent recipient, which shows that both recipients appear to be treating the answers sought by L’s queries as self-evident. Of particular interest here is that, having undergone two successive implicit attacks on the unexpected and unwarranted status of these queries, L Wrst ou-receipts (line 10) the response, but then subsequently moves (lines 12B13) to explicate his knowledge base: that while he did in fact have (independent) knowledge that the Taiwanese Major League team has won this year’s championship, he did not have that independent knowledge about the Little League team. (The second half of this explication, however, is overlapped and interrupted by W’s reassertion of the news (line 14) and is only halfway projected.) In eVect, what L attempts to accomplish through the explication of his knowledge state, at least in part,44 appears to be defending the legitimacy and relevance of his prior inquiries C i.e., that these inquiries were launched to mark the matters being addressed as news for him. While the a tokens in the previous examples ((1), (5), (6), (23), (29), (33)) all attach to reconWrmations initiated in response to conWrmation (or information) requests, Wnal a can also be attached to a reassertion produced at the speaker’s own initiative. This can be illustrated by the following excerpt, which provides a slightly expanded version of the previously-examined (31), involving a discussion of a mutual friend’s prospective girlfriend. (34) (CS Party ordinary 466A; video 37:00) 5X:

= her name just be admirer =‘’

6

(0.5)

7H:

shei? who ‘Who?’

8T:

[%victor% bei yangmu le (ma) (name) BEI admire CRS Q [‘%Victor% has been admired./?’

((in the kitchen at the moment))

((to X))


9X:

[wu-qing a (name) PRT [‘Wu Qing.’

10X:

[[wu-qing a (name) PRT [[‘Wu Qing.’

11L:

[[ changchang qu zhao ta. (name) have one C girlfriend often go visit 3sg [[‘ (who) goes to visit him very often.’

12X:

3sg have one C admirer PRT ‘’

13H:

ou, na ge- [wu-qing la.= PRT that C (name) PRT ‘Oh. That’s- [Wu Qing.’=

14X:

15L:→

16X:=>

[wu-qing shi tade yangmuzhe a (name) be his admirer PRT [‘Wu Qing is his admirer.’ [((X turning gaze to L)) =wo ye bu xiaode ta jiao shenme mingzi jiu yi ge- ((to H)) I also N know 3sg call what name just one C =‘I don’t know what her name is. (She’s) just a-’ wu-qing a. (name) PRT ‘Wu Qing A.’

((to L))

Here, in response to H’s identiWcation of the woman’s name (line 13),45 L seems hesitant (line 15) to provide a straightforward aYrmative response; instead, he claims a lack of suYcient knowledge of this speciWc matter (wo ye bu xiaode ta jiao shenme mingzi ‘I don’t know what her name is’) before apparently proceeding to aYrm only the understanding that this mutual friend does have a new girlfriend C or an “admirer” (jiu yi ge- ‘just a (girlfriend/admirer)’; line 15). While L’s non-committal stance to the name proVered by H may come from the fact that L himself C in contrast to H C has just learned about this news from X, and hence may Wnd it awkward to conWrm this matter, his (L’s) claim of lack of knowledge of this woman’s name

Final a 195

can nonetheless appear inadequate to speaker X, and may even appear itself as a sign of misalignment, given that X has just asserted the woman’s name three times (lines 9, 10, 14) in the immediately preceding sequence. Note then that, before L’s turn (in line 15) comes to a possible completion point, X turns his gaze to L, asserts the woman’s name one more time, and suYxes the name with a Wnal a (line 16). This time, the a-suYxing appears to be addressed to the problematic nature of L’s just-prior disclaimer of something which he in fact has already known (about). What we have seen thus far in this section, then, is a speciWc use of Wnal a: marking a prior speaker’s utterance as unexpected and/or problematic by virtue of the fact that that utterance implicates or displays the prior speaker’s ignorance of something which the a speaker supposes him or her to have known. This supposition, as we have seen, may turn on personal knowledge shared by the prior speaker and the a speaker; or it may be predicated on the immediate interactional history C i.e., what has been made available, prima facie at least, from the prior talk. There is, however, another set of cases in which it is not the sheer ignorance of supposedly known-in-common information that is at issue. It is rather the perceivably (from the a speaker’s point of view) dispreferred or problematic status of the presupposition, understanding, and/or stance displayed or conveyed in a prior speaker’s utterance that is in question. In the present corpus, for example, Wnal a is frequently observed to occur in responses to questions which serve as vehicles for accomplishing dispreferred interactional work, especially questions which display a negative stance toward the matter under discussion, and/or toward the recipient. Excerpt (35) provides just such a case. Here, speaker L is inquiring about how long speaker T is planning to stay home on his upcoming trip to Taiwan from the US. (35) (CS Party A094A; video 08:53) 1L:

a ni huiqu duojiu. PRT you return how-long ‘How long will you go home for?’

2

(0.5)

3T:

yi ge duo libai eryi. one C more week only ‘Only a little over a week.’


4L:

a zenme name gan. PRT how that hurry ‘Why so rushed?’

5

(0.3)

6T:→

khhh cha bu duo a. (clear throat) minus N more PRT ‘kkh (That’s) about average A.’

Note Wrst that L’s question in line 4 (zenme name gan ‘why so rushed?’) is built of a negative assessment of the information provided in T’s response in line 3 (yi ge duo libai eryi ‘only a little over a week’), and, in eVect, challenges the appropriateness of T’s schedule and requests an account for it. Note then that T’s response in line 6, which deXects this challenge by asserting his length of stay as normal, is suYxed with a. Excerpt (36) provides another instance of Wnal a attached to an utterance given in response to a question with a strong negative implication. Prior to this excerpt, speaker T has expressed his dislike for wine. This excerpt begins with another less-than-positive comment he makes (line 1) after tasting the wine host W had purchased. (36) (CS Party authentic B016) 1T:

hou, zhe yi ci bu neng he tai duo. (exclamation) this one C N can drink too much ‘Hou, this (wine you) can’t drink too much at a time.’

2

(.)

3

(1.2)

4T:

ni zhende juede jiu hao he ou? you really feel wine good drink PRT ‘You really think wine is tasty?’

5W:→

man hao he de a. pretty good drink PRT PRT ‘Pretty tasty A.’

6

(.)

((to W))

Final a 197

7X:→

wo juede ye man hao he a I feel also pretty good drink PRT ‘I also feel (it’s) pretty tasty A.’

In line 4, T directs a question to W. Note two design features of T’s question. First, this question is constructed through the practice of ou-suYxing, which, among other things, can mark the matter being addressed as news for the ou speaker, as has been discussed in Chapter 3. Second, and more crucially, this question contains a lexical item, zhende (‘really’), whose incorporation has been claimed, at least for its equivalent in English (e.g., Koshik 1999, Heritage 2002b), to have the eVect of “‘raising the bar’ to justify anything other than a ‘no’ answer” (Koshik ibid.:189), and, in doing so, maximizing the questioner’s negative epistemic stance toward the matter being addressed. What these two design features amount to, then, is a hearably disbelief-implicated challenge to W’s interest in wine. Note then that, in the face of this strongly negatively-implicated stance displayed in the question, both W and X deploy the practice of a-suYxing when asserting an opposite position in response to this question. In the present corpus, it is not only questions with a clear negative orientation to the matter involved that are frequently responded to with an a-suYxed answer. Questions which do not display a negative orientation, but which nonetheless display a problematic presupposition, are frequently also treated in the same way. Excerpt (37) below, from a multi-party conversation recorded in the US, oVers a case in point. This excerpt begins with a sequence in which speaker X and speaker L are discussing the prices of computers in Taiwan. In this sequence, speaker L, who is moving back to Taiwan soon, repeatedly asserts (lines 3, 5, 6) that computers in Taiwan are generally more expensive than those in the United States, even at computer shows. After this sequence is brought to a conclusion, another coparticipant, T, directs a query to L (line 8) regarding whether or not the latter intends to purchase a computer in the United States and take it back to Taiwan. This query meets two asuYxed responses (lines 9, 10), produced in overlap with each other. (37) (CS Party A080A) 1X:

keshi taiwan diannao zhan deshihou but Taiwan computer show when ‘But when (there are) computer shows in Taiwan,’


2X:

na ge diannao mai chulai bu shi ye- bu hui hen gui ma. that C computer sell out N be also N ASP very expensive Q ‘isn’t it true that computers aren’t sold at a high price?’

3L:

hai shi man gui de. still be pretty expensive PRT ‘Still pretty expensive.’

4X:

[zhende ma. really Q [‘Really?’

5L:

[ta shuo hai shi hen gui. 3sg say still be very expensive [‘He said (it’s) still very expensive.’

6L:

dui. right ‘Right.’

7

(0.5)

8T:

na ni you mei you dasuan mai yi tai huiqu. hhh then you have N have plan buy one C return (laugh) ‘Then are you planning to buy a computer and take it back? hhhh’

9L:→

[wo you mai (a) maiI have buy PRT buy [‘I already did (A). (I) bought-’

10W:→

[ta you mai a 3sg have buy PRT [‘He already did A.’

11T:

zhende really ‘Really?’

To understand how these two a suYxes relate to T’s prior question (line 8), several aspects of this question deserve mentioning. First, T’s question is delivered in a non-serious manner, as revealed by his intonation and his laughter following the question. Second, this question is initiated after a sequence (lines 1B6) in which L had just asserted the high prices of computers in Taiwan, and is designed to be built on the upshot of that sequence (through

Final a 199

the use of a sequential linkage marker, na ‘then’46; line 8). Given this sequential position and relationship, T’s display of a “non-serious” stance in his question in eVect reveals his expectation of a negative response to this question C namely, that it is unlikely, if not impossible, for L to purchase a computer in the United States and take it back to Taiwan. As it happens, however, this displayed expectation turns out to be faulty: L not only planned to buy a computer, but has in fact already bought one. In the next turns (lines 9, 10), then, both the recipient (L) and another participant (W) come to make an explicit correction, and both suYx their corrections with a Wnal a. These two a suYxes, therefore, can be understood as serving here to address T’s displayed faulty presupposition C one whose very existence is retrospectively conWrmed by the newsmark T produces (line 11) in response to W’s and L’s corrective informings. The use of Wnal a to address a faulty presupposition displayed by a prior speaker can also be seen in the following example. This time, however, what is cast in doubt is not the prior speaker’s presupposition of a state of aVairs, but that of its tellability. This example is drawn from a telephone conversation between two friends, T and L. At this point, they are talking about a mutual friend, Julie, who is a fellow graduate student and co-worker of T, and whom L knows through his girlfriend. Where this excerpt begins, T is Wnishing a report that Julie’s (and his) advisor is ready to grant her the degree, contingent on the results of her job search. (38) (T-copyright 235) 1T:

jiu kan ta gongzuo zhao de zemeyang ranhou: just see 3sg job look-for CSC how then ‘Just depends on the results of her job search, and then:’

2L:

yinwei tabecause 3sg ‘Because she-’

3L:

ta shuo %roger::% na ge gongsi haoxiang you zhao ta. 3sg say (name) that C company seem have look- for 3sg ‘she said %Roger’s::% company seemed to have contacted her.’

4

(0.2)


5L:

a hai you shenme %paciWc-bell% PRT also have what (company) ‘And also companies like %PaciWc Bell.%’

6

(0.2)

7T:→

pt!

Stance in Talk: A Conversation Analysis of Mandarin Final Particles (Pragmatics & Beyond New)

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When Listeners Talk (Pragmatics & Beyond New)

Contrastive Functional Analysis (Pragmatics & Beyond New)

Getting Acquainted in Conversation: A Study of Initial Interactions (Pragmatics & Beyond New, Volume 64)

South Slavic Discourse Particles (Pragmatics and Beyond. New Series)

The Japanese Sentence-Final Particles in Talk-in-Interaction

Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French (Pragmatics & Beyond New)

Epistemic Stance in English Conversation: A Description of Its Interactional Functions, with a Focus on I Think (Pragmatics & Beyond New)

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