In everyday interactions, taking divergent positions, such as resisting someone’s advice or making a contradictory assessment on some issues, is commonplace and may cause trouble or conflicts. When divergent positions are taken by participants, the progressivity of interactions is inhibited, and the discrepancy must be resolved somehow to retrieve the progressivity. Conceding can serve as a means of addressing disrupting viewpoints between two parties (Pomerantz 1984). Therefore, the preference for agreement and continuity may result in a concession of one party from one’s previously-taken position (see Sacks 1987), so that affiliation can be achieved and progressivity of interactions can be retrieved. Quite a few researchers have studied the patterns used to make concessive steps (e.g. Antaki and Wetherell 1999), but the conceding speakers in their studies may not truly affiliate with the co-participants in that they concede to better defend their own claims. Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (2000, 381) argued that concessions can be used to express alignment, acknowledging the validity of the co-participants’ previous claim, such as through the responsive token yeah (ibid., 389). Similar responsive tokens can also be found in Swedish, such as a/ja (‘yes’, ‘well’), okej (‘okay’), which foreshadow a backdown from a previous claim (Lindström and Londen 2014, 7). However, very few studies have paid attention to concessive responsive tokens in Mandarin Chinese.

References

Antaki, Charles, and Margaret Wetherell

1999 “Show Concessions.” Discourse Studies 1 (1): 7–27.

Arita, Yuki

2021 “Display of Concession: Maa-Prefaced Responses to Polar Questions in Japanese Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 186: 1–19.

Chang, Li-Hsiang

2009 “Stance Uses of the Mandarin LE Constructions in Conversational Discourse.” Journal of Pragmatics 41: 2240–2256.

Chui, Kawai

2002 “Ritualization in Evolving Pragmatic Functions: A Case Study of duì .” Language and Linguistics 3 (4): 645–663.

Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Sandra A. Thompson

2000 “Concessive Patterns in Conversation.” In Cause, Condition, Concession, and Contrast: Cognitive and Discourse Perspectives, ed. by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Bernd Kortmann, 381–410. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, and Sandra A. Thompson

2005 “A Linguistic Practice for Retracting Overstatements: ‘Concessive Repair’.” In Syntax and Lexis in Conversation: Studies on the Use of Linguistic Resources in Talk-in-interaction, ed. by Auli Hakulinen, and Margret Selting, 257–288. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Curl, Traci S.

2006 “Offers of Assistance: Constraints on Syntactic Design.” Journal of Pragmatics 38 (8): 1257–1280.

Ge, Kaizhen

2019 “On the Features of Stance-taking of ‘Shuo shihua’ and ‘Shuo zhende’.” Journal of Henan Polytechnic University (Social Sciences) 20 (2):71–75.

Gunthner, Susanne

2016 “Concessive Patterns in Interaction: Uses of zwar…aber (‘true…but’)-Constructions in Everyday Spoken German.” Language Sciences 58: 144–162.

Heritage, John

1984 Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Policy Press.

Heritage, John, and Geoffrey Raymond

2005 “The Term of Agreement: Indexing Epistemic Authority and Subordination in Talk-in-Interaction.” Social Psychology Quarterly 68 (1): 15–38.

Heritage, John, and Sue Sefi

1992 “Dilemmas of Advice: Aspects of the Delivery and Reception of Advice in Interactions between Home Visits and First-Time Mothers.” In Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. by Paul Drew, and John Heritage, 359–417. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hsieh, Chen-Yu Chester

2018 “From Turn-Taking to Stance-Taking: Wenti-shi ‘(the) thing is’ as a Projector Construction and an Epistemic Marker in Mandarin Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 127: 107–124.

Jefferson, Gail

2004a “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 13–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Jefferson, Gail

2004b “A Sketch of Some Orderly Aspects of Overlap in Natural Conversation.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene H. Lerner, 43–59. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kärkkäinen, Elise

2003 Epistemic Stance in English Conversation: A Description of Its Interactional Functions, with a Focus on I Think. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Koivisto, Aino

2012 “Discourse Patterns for Turn-final Conjunctions.” Journal of Pragmatics 44: 1254–1272.

Kotthoff, Helga

1993 “Disagreement and Concession in Disputes: On the Context Sensitivity of Preference Structures.” Language in Society 22 (2): 193–216.

Lewis, Diana M.

2005 “Arguing in English and French Asynchronous Online Discussion.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1801–1818.

Li, Xianyin

2016 “A Study on Multiple Sayings in Spoken Chinese: From an Interactional Perspective.” Language Education and Research 4: 84–93.

Li, Yan

2010 “Functional Analysis of Discourse on the Mark ‘duì’.” Journal of Jinan University 4: 118–123.

Lindström, Jan K., and Anne-Marie Londen

2013 “Concession and Reassertion: On a Dialogic Discourse Pattern in Conversation.” Text & Talk 33 (3): 331–352.

Lindström, Jan K., and Anne-Marie Londen

2014 “Insertion Concessive: An Interactional Practice as a Discourse Grammatical Construction.” Constructions 1 (3): 1–11.

Marian, Klara S., Jenny Nilsson, Catrin Norrby, Jan Lindström, and Camilla Wide

2023 “On the Verge of (In)directness: Managing Complaints in Service Interactions.” Journal of Pragmatics 213: 126–144.

Müller, Frank E.

1996 “Affiliating and Disaffiliating with Continuers: Prosodic Aspects of Recipiency.” In Prosody in Conversation, ed. by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Margret Selting, 131–176. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Peng, Shuiqin, and Juanman Zheng

2022 “The Sequence Characteristics and Conventionalization of the ‘Na Daoshi’.” Chinese Language Learning 5: 33–41.

Pomerantz, Anita

1984 “Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes.” In Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. by John Maxwell Atkinson, and John Heritage, 57–101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sacks, Harvey

1987 “On the Preference for Agreement and Contiguity in Sequences in Conversation.” In Talk and Social Organization, ed. by Graham Button, and John R. E. Lee, 54–69. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Schegloff, Emanuel A.

1992 “Repair after Next Turn: The Last Structurally Provided Defense of Intersubjectivity in Conversation.” American Journal of Sociology 95 (5): 1295–1345.

Schegloff, Emanuel A.

2007 Sequence Organization in Interaction: A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schegloff, Emanuel A., Gail Jefferson, and Harvey Sacks

1977 “The Preference for Self-Correction in the Organization of Repair in Conversation.” Language 53: 361–382.

Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie

2008 “Almost Certainly and Most Definitely: Degree Modifiers and Epistemic Stance.” Journal of Pragmatics 40: 1521–1542.

Smith, Michael S., and Lucas M. Seuren

2022 “Re-apprehending Misapprehensions: A Practice for Disclosing Troubles in Understanding in Talk-in-Interaction.” Journal of Pragmatics 193: 43–58.

Stevanovic, Melisa, and Anssi Peräkylä

2012 “Deontic Authority in Interaction: The Right to Announce, Propose and Decide.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45 (3):297–321.

Stivers, Tanya

2004 “ ‘No no no’ and Other Types of Multiple Sayings in Social Interaction.” Human Communication Research 30 (2): 260–293.

Stivers, Tanya

2022 The Book of Answers: Alignment, Autonomy, and Affiliation in Social Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig

2011 “Knowledge, Morality and Affiliation in Social Interaction.” In The Morality of Knowledge in Conversation, ed. by Tanya Stivers, Lorenza Mondada, and Jakob Steensig, 3–24. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sun, Liping, and Qingming Fang

2011 “Overview of Study on Types and Functions of Chinese Discourse Markers.” Chinese Language Learning 6: 76–84.

Tsai, Hsiu-Chun

2001 “The Discourse Function of the duì Receipt in Mandarin Conversation.” Master’s Thesis, National Taiwan Normal University.

Wang, Yu-Fang, Pi-Hua Tsai, David Goodman, and Meng-Ying Lin

2020 “Agreement, Acknowledgement, and Alignment: The Discourse-Pragmatic Functions of hao and duì in Taiwan Mandarin Chinese.” Discourse Studies 12 (2): 241–267.

Wu, Ruey-Jiuan Regina, and John Heritage

2017 “Particles and Epistemics: Convergences and Divergences between English and Mandarin.” In Enabling Human Conduct, ed. by Geoffrey Raymond, Gene H. Lerner, and John Heritage, 273–297. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Yang, Jie

2013 “A Multimodal Study of Response Token duì duì duì in Mandarin Conversation.” Master’s Thesis, University of Alberta.

Yu, Guodong

2022 “ Ai (唉) as a Topic Transition Signal in Mandarin Conversations.” Journal of Foreign Languages 45 (2): 61–71, 92.

Zhang, Shuling

2021 “The Epistemics of Advice-Giving Sequences: Epistemic Primacy and Subordination in Advice Rejection.” Discourse Studies 23 (6): 705–725.

Zhou, Xiaoli

2022 “Acknowledging Coparticipant’s Contribution to One’s Interactional Goal: The Multiple Saying duì duì duì in Mandarin Chinese Conversations.” Journal of Pragmatics 200: 98–118.