“Salient” communicative acts in Mandarin: Introducing a model of context, practice and perception
Weihua Zhu
University of Wisconsin-Madison
This study departed from the CA approach but proposed a model of context, practice and perception to account for “salient” communicative acts in Mandarin such as strong disagreement, extended concurrent speech and unexpected topic switching.
Researchers have argued that strong disagreement (Pomerantz 1984), long simultaneous speech (Schegloff 2000), and unexpected topic switching (Covelli and Murray 1980) are dispreferred. However, insufficient research has been conducted to examine native Chinese speakers’ practice and perception of disagreement, turn taking and topic switching. To fill the gap, I recorded 97-hour mundane conversations among relatively equal-status, non-familial native Chinese speakers, and conducted playback and ethnographic interviews with some of the participants in a southeastern Chinese city. I employed interactional sociolinguistic methods to analyze the conversations.
Results show that the native Chinese speakers expressed strong disagreement, deployed extended concurrent speech, and switched topics unexpectedly. The communicative acts were considered “salient” because they did not follow any verbal or nonverbal cues. But the participants did not react to the communicative acts with negative evaluations or signs. They did not leave the conversations unhappily either. Instead, they contributed to the conversations actively, which indicates that they acknowledged the appropriateness of the communicative acts and that their rapport with the addressees was not damaged. More importantly, the interviewers pointed out the normality of the communicative acts in everyday talk in Mandarin. The appropriateness and normality were constrained by the context of the talk.
To better account for the data, I proposed a model of context, practice and perception demonstrating that context, practice and perception are interconnected in a dynamic, fluid and complex way. Practice solidifies perception, while perception modifies practice. Context shapes practice and perception, while practice and perception establish context. Context can consist of the sociocultural context (e.g. the setting, region, and temporality), the personal context (e.g. sex, age, education, temperament, habit, awareness and belief) and the interactional context (e.g. interactional goals, risks, conversation topics, relevance, interactants’ verbal/nonverbal cues, social distance and status difference).
This study questions the previous claims of strong disagreement, long simultaneous speech and unexpected topic switching as dispreferred, and criticizes universal interactional or pragmatic norms. The proposed model displays the social and cognitive features of strong disagreement, extended concurrent speech and unexpected topic switching. It can contribute to the fields of discourse analysis, pragmatics and Chinese linguistics. The findings can enhance public understanding of native Chinese speakers in intercultural communication.