SONG, Zixuan | AMPRA4

Collaborative Construction of a Single Syntactic Unit in Mandarin Conversation

Zixuan Song

In everyday conversation, sometimes one single syntactic unit, such as a sentence or a clause, can be produced collaboratively by more than one speakers. As Lerner (1991) notes, collaboratively constructed turn usually has a two-part format, such as the ‘if x… then y’ format in English. While Ono and Thompson (1996) shows that participants can also collaboratively construct a simple sentence. The goal of this research is to show what kind of speech actions (displaying understanding, seeking confirmation, asking question, etc.) are performed by participants when they collaboratively construct a single syntactic unit.

This research adopts the methodologies of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and multimodal analysis. The data used in this research is 12 hours of naturally occurring face-to-face Mandarin conversation. I have identified 80 examples of collaborative construction of a single syntactic unit. In this research, I will compare two types of collaborative construction of a single syntactic unit in Mandarin Chinese. (1) Two speakers collaboratively construct a simple sentence or a clause (N=53); (2) two speakers collaboratively construct a compound sentence (N=27). I look exclusively at the examples that the first speaker (speaker A) produces a syntactically incomplete turn (SIT), and the second speakers (speaker B) completes it. An early analysis shows that speaker B performs different speech actions in type (1) and type (2). One particular speech action performed by speaker B through collaborative construction is seeking confirmation. When seeking confirmation, the part produced by speaker B’s always has a unique characteristic on its form. That is B could change the collaboratively constructed turn to an interrogative, by adding a tag or a final particle at the end of the turn. For example, the following excerpt comes from my data.

Excerpt 01

但我朋友都在;

dan wo pengyou dou zai

but my friends all in

‘But all my friends are in’

e 吗-

shenzhen ma

(NAME) PRT

‘Shenzhen, right?’

In this excerpt, A produced a SIT in line 01, and B finishes it in line 02 with a final particle ma at the end of the turn. The final particle ma changes the collaboratively produced turn to an interrogative. Which shows that B seeks confirmation from A. There are 16 examples of speaker changing the collaboratively constructed syntactic unit to an interrogative are found in my data. There are 12 examples from type (1), 4 examples from type (2). The result shows that when a simple sentence is projected by speaker A’s SIT, speaker B is more likely to seek confirmation than when a complex sentence is projected. Since the research is still in progress, I would like to further explore the different interactional characteristics of the two types of collaborative constructions in Mandarin Chinese.