Chapter 10
Turn design and progression
The use of aiyou in Mandarin
conversation
The temporal character of talk is one fundamental feature of language
in situ. As interaction unfolds, participants
need to not only monitor the temporal progression of talk toward
completion, but also attend to how the current turn ties back to the
preceding turns. Whereas such dual-directional consideration is
often a latent aspect of turn construction, efforts to clear up
possible ambiguity are sometimes in order. This article introduces a
Mandarin practice, the aiyou-preface, which seems
to be used to just this end, and demonstrates an intimate
relationship between the prosodic design of
aiyou-preface and the displayed orientation to the
intended directionality of the talk. The analysis draws upon a
corpus of 35 hours of conversations collected in China.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The Mandarin aiyou
- 3.Directionality: backward-looking or forward-looking
- 4.Directionality and turn design
- 5.Concluding discussion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Arita, Yuki
2023.
Demo
“but”-prefaced responses to inquiry in Japanese
.
Discourse Processes 60:8
► pp. 594 ff.
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