Cover not available
Article published In:
Chinese Language and Discourse
Vol. 6:2 (2015) ► pp.133–161

Directive-giving and grammatical forms

Mitigation devices in a medical laboratory setting

| The University of Hong Kong
| City University of Hong Kong
| Hong Kong Hospital Authority
This paper investigates the use of grammatical forms in directive sequences by drawing on daily interactions between colleagues in a medical laboratory in Hong Kong. From a conversation analytic perspective, we focus on how directives in Cantonese are commonly formulated and how the force of a directive is mitigated. Our analysis shows that (1) the imperative seems to be the most frequently used syntactic form for giving directives and there is no apparent hierarchical (‘power’) differentiation, (2) the imperative-formulated directives are frequently mitigated by the use of a range of linguistic forms as well as interactional resources.
Keywords: Cantonese, workplace interaction, Directives, grammar and interaction, mitigation devices
Published online: 28 January 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cld.6.2.02cha
References (40)
Antaki, Charles, and Alexandra Kent. 2012. “Telling People What to Do (and, sometimes, why): Contingency, Entitlement and Explanation in Staff Requests to Adults with Intellectual Impairments.” Journal of Pragmatics 441: 876–889. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Asmuß, Birte, and Jan Svennevig. 2009. “Meeting Talk: An Introduction.” Journal of Business Communication 46 (1): 3–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bilbow, Graham. 1995. “Requesting Strategies in the Cross-cultural Business Meeting.” Pragmatics 5 (1): 45–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bilbow, Grahame. 1997. “Spoken Discourse in the Multicultural Workplace in Hong Kong: Applying a Model of Discourse as ‘Impression Management’.” In The Language of Business: An International Perspective, ed. by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini and Sandra Harris, 21–48. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, and Juliane House. 1989. “Cross-cultural and Situational Variation in Requestive Behavior.” In Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, ed. by Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper, 123–154. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Boden, Deirdre. 1994. The Business of Talk: Organizations in Action. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Byon, Andrew Sangpil. 2006. “The Role of Linguistic Indirectness and Honorifics in Achieving Linguistic Politeness in Korean.” Journal of Politeness Research 21: 247–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Rong, Lin He, and Chunmei Hu. 2013. “Chinese Requests: In Comparison to American and Japanese Requests and with Reference to the “East-West Divide”.” Journal of Pragmatics 551: 140–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Craven, Alexandra, and Jonathan Potter. 2010. “Directives: Entitlement and Contingency in Action.” Discourse Studies 12 (4): 419–442. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Curl, Traci, and Paul Drew. 2008. “Contingency and Action: A Comparison of Two Forms of Requesting.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 41 (2): 129–153. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Drew, Paul, and John Heritage (eds). 1992. Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ervin-Tripp, Susan. 1976. “Is Sybil there? The Structure of some American English Directives.” Language in Society 51: 25–66. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fang, Xiaoyan. 2003. Guangzhou Fangyan Jumo Yuqi Zhuci [Sentence-Final Mood Particles of the Guangzhou Cantonese]. Guangzhou: Jinan University Press.Google Scholar
Fukushima, Saeko. 2000. Requests and Culture: Politeness in British English and Japanese. Bern: Lang.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. 2006. “Participation, Affect, and Trajectory in Family Directive/Response Sequences.” Text & Talk 26 (4/5): 515–543. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, Sandra. 2003. “Politeness and Power: Making and Responding to ‘Requests’ in Institutional Settings.” Text 23 (1): 27–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heritage, John, and Steven Clayman. 2010. Talk in Action: Interactions, Identities, and institutions. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holmes, Janet, and Maria Stubbe. 2003. Power and Politeness in the Workplace: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Talk at Work. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Keisanen, Tinna, and Mirka Rauniomaa. 2012. “The Organisation of Participation and Contingency in Prebeginnings of Request Sequences.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (4): 323–351. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koester, Almut. 2010. Workplace Discourse. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Kwok, Helen. 1984. Sentence Particles in Cantonese. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong.Google Scholar
Lee, Cynthia. 2005. “A Cross-linguistic Study on Cantonese and English Requests.” Pragmatics 15 (4): 395–422. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2011. “Strategy and Linguistic Preference of Requests by Cantonese Learners of English: An Interlanguage and Cross-cultural Comparison.” Multilingua 301: 99–129. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lee-Wong, Song Mei. 2000. Politeness and Face in Chinese Culture. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Li, Charles N., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Luke, Kang Kwong. 1990. Utterance Particles in Cantonese Conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matthews, Stephen, and Virginia Yip. 2011. Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. (2nd edition). London/New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mondada, Lorenza. 2014. “Instructions in the Operating room: How the Surgeon Directs their Assistant’s Hands.” Discourse Studies 16 (2): 131–161. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pufahl Bax, Ingrid. 1986. “How to Assign Work in an Office: A Comparison of Spoken and Written Directives in American English.” Journal of Pragmatics 101: 673–692. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rue, Yong-Ju, and Grace Qiao Zhang. 2008. Request Strategies: A Comparative Studies in Mandarin Chinese and Korean. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E.A. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis I. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Upadhyay, Shiv R. 2003. “Nepali Requestive Acts: Linguistic Indirectness and Politeness Reconsidered.” Journal of Pragmatics 351: 1651–1677. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vine, Bernadette. 2004. Getting Things Done at Work: The Discourse of Power in Workplace Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009. “Directives at Work: Exploring the Contextual Complexity of Workplace Directives.” Journal of Pragmatics 411: 1395–1405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weigel, Margaret M., and Ronald M. Weigel. 1985. “Directive use in a Migrant Agricultural Community: A Test of Ervin-Tripp’s Hypotheses.” Language in Society 141: 63–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2003. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. (2nd edition). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wang, Vincent X. 2011. Making Requests by Chinese EFL Learners. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wootton, Anthony J. 2005. “Interactional and sequential configurations informing request format selection in children’s speech.” In Syntax and Lexis in Conversation: Studies on the Use of Linguistic Resources in Talk-in-Interaction, ed. by Auli Hakulinen and Margret Selting, 185–207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Du-Babcock, Bertha & Angela Chi Kuen Chan
2019. Can Simulated Data be Comparable to Authentic Data?: A Comparative Analysis of Meeting Chairing Activities. Business Communication Research and Practice 2:2 ► pp. 62 ff. DOI logo
Lim, Ni-Eng
2019. Introduction. Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 10:2 ► pp. 127 ff. DOI logo
Ren, Wei
2018. Mitigation in Chinese online consumer reviews. Discourse, Context & Media 26 ► pp. 5 ff. DOI logo
Chan, Angela
2017. Chapter 3. Constructing a “competent” meeting chair. In Identity Struggles [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 69], ► pp. 39 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 1 august 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.