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Article published In:
The Joint Production of Conversational Turns
Edited by K.K. Luke and Mei Fang
[Chinese Language and Discourse 12:1] 2021
► pp. 52–83

Collaborative assessments in Mandarin conversation

Syntax, prosody, and embodied action

| Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

The co-production of a sentence is a phenomenon that is widely observed in talk-in-interaction across languages. However, with a few notable exceptions, there is still much room for the investigation of how the co-production of sentences is put to the service of specific actions and activities in different language communities. This paper, using 10 hours of video-recorded data, examines the co-production of assessments (“collaborative assessments”) in Mandarin conversation. It is found that speakers can use syntactic, prosodic, and bodily-visual devices to realize assessment collaboration, and that the functions of collaborative assessment include (1) helping provide a candidate assessment term and facilitating the assessment; (2) articulating/specifying ‘vague’ assessments; (3) helping complete the foreshadowing of a negative assessment term; and (4) co-participation in the assessment activity. This paper also discusses the design features of co-completion and subsequent responses on the basis of the continuum of speakers’ epistemic authority and agency in collaborative assessment sequences and concludes with some implications of this study for grammar as practice.

Keywords: co-production, collaborative assessment, turn design, embodied action
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Collaborative assessment and its functions
    • 4.1Schemas of collaborative assessment
    • 4.2Interactional functions of collaborative assessments
      • 4.2.1Helping to provide a candidate assessment term and facilitating the assessment
      • 4.2.2Articulating/specifying ‘vague’ assessment
      • 4.2.3Helping to complete a foreshadowing negative assessment term
      • 4.2.4Co-participation in the assessment activity
  • 5.Responses to collaborative assessments
  • 6.Implications of this study
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.00037.fan
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