LINGUIST List 26.2525
Mon May 18 2015
Review: Discourse; Phonology; Pragmatics; Syntax: Li (2014)
Editor for this issue: Sara Couture <saralinguistlist.org>
Date: 04-Jan-2015
From: Qiong Li < qiongl
andrew.cmu.edu">qiongli1014
gmail.com; qiongl
andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: Multimodality, Interaction and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation
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AUTHOR: Xiaoting Li
TITLE: Multimodality, Interaction and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse 3
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Qiong Li, Carnegie Mellon University
Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
The book, based on the theory and methodology of conversation analysis (CA) and interactional linguistics, presents an exploratory study on the role of multimodal resources, i.e. syntax, prosody, body movements and pragmatic resources, and their interaction in organization of turns in naturally occurring Mandarin face-to-face conversation. It includes seven chapters, with a focus on the introduction in Chapter 1, methodology in Chapter 2, syntax in Chapter 3, prosody in Chapter 4, body movements in Chapter 5, the interplay of the three resources with pragmatic resources in Chapter 6, and the conclusion in Chapter 7.
Chapter 1 is an introduction to the basic concepts related to turn organization (e.g., turn, turn-constructional unit, turn project) through presenting examples in Mandarin conversation. The multimodal resources including syntax, prosody and body movements are introduced. Despite the achievements made by previous studies on Mandarin Chinese, neither the specific ways in which syntactic constructions are deployed in turn-constructional units (TCUs) and turns, nor naturally occurring Mandarin conversation has been fully explored. To fill in these gaps, this book attempts to illuminate the complex interaction of multiple resources with pragmatic resources in face-to-face Mandarin turn organization.
Chapter 2 presents the methodological issues involved in the study, including data collection, data transcription and methodological approaches. Fifteen naturally occurring conversations were recorded via audio and video among 23 participants (14 females and 9 males) who are either friends or family members. Verbal data were transcribed on the basis of GAT2 (Gesprachsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2) due to its advantage of consistency in capturing the sound features of the data. The transcription symbols developed by C. Goodwin (1981), Heath (1984, 1986), and Kendon (2004) were adopted in the study to transcribe visual body movements. Each intonation unit, pauses and visual behaviors were transcribed as an individual line. CA was adopted in data analysis in order to discover the patterns, structures and practices in the organization of talk-in-interaction through detailed transcription. The author took the perspective of interactional linguistics to reveal the reflexive relationship between language structure and interaction.
Chapter 3 provides an account of the features of particular Mandarin lexico-syntactic structures and their interactional relevance to turn organization and completion in Mandarin conversation. Two types of syntactic structure (i.e., topic-comment and copula-complement structures) and three types of syntactic features (i.e., word order, utterance-final particles, and certain lexico-syntactic constructions) are discussed on the basis of the collected data. In turn organization, topic-comment functions as a whole structure when signalling recipients to take their turns after the comment, while copula-complement furnishes speakers with a device to collaboratively construct the next turn at the juncture between the copula and the complement. In turn completion, both SOV and SVO word orders are introduced, but they serve as predictors of a possible turn completion point in different ways. The SVO ordering allows an early projection while the SOV structure defers the projection. In Mandarin conversation, the data also uncovers that utterance-final particles and certain lexico-syntactic constructions (e.g.,NP+VP+de+shi+NP) are frequently used to indicate possible turn completion.
Chapter 4 involves two sections investigating the prosody in naturally occurring face-to-face Mandarin conversation from an interactional approach. The first section introduces the intonation unit and its role in turn construction in Mandarin conversation. Coherent intonation contours including global declining, rising and level intonation are demonstrated to be predictors of turn construction in Mandarin conversation. Moreover, no systematic one-to-one correspondence between intonation units and TCUs (including single-TCU and multi-TCU turns) is observed because alignment and non-alignment coexist across various sequential contexts regarding the relationship between intonation units and TCUs. The second section examined one type of prosodic/phonetic feature, the possible last accent, in the projection and recognition of possible turn completion. The possible last accent is the accent near the end of a TCU which can be characterized by a prominently higher or lower pitch register, a noticeably broader pitch range, a longer duration or higher volume. The collected data show that the feature is relevant to possible turn completion in Mandarin conversation. On the other hand, there is no turn transition after the possible last accent if the action trajectory, turn management or contingency in interaction occurs.
Chapter 5 sets out to focus on visual resources in turn organization: body movements. Two types of body movements, gestures and postural shifts, and their interactional functions are discussed in this chapter. First, it presents the role of gesture units in turn construction of single-TCU and multi-TCU turns. There is one-to-one correspondence between hand gesture and the single-TCU turns if any gesture is involved in Mandarin conversation, whereas, the gesture units are more complex in multi-TCU turns, usually consisting of more than one gesture. Moreover, gestures, i.e. hand movements, may also be deployed as visible and recognizable signals for turn completion. In the data, the return of gesture and a certain type of hand movement, i.e. self-groom, are observed at turn endings, and evidence is provided to show that conversational participants orient to gesture as a cue for the possible completion of a turn. As for the postural shifts, the findings reveal several functions of postural shift, such as a visual display of the speaker’s preference for the extended turns and sequences as units in interaction, a resource to indicate the type of speaker’s engagement in the interaction and the possible completion, as well as the function of framing the activity implemented in the larger interaction units. The study, therefore, relates both body movements and posture to turn organization in Mandarin conversation.
Based on the finding that pragmatic resources, i.e. social actions, are a relevant factor involved in all interaction in the data, Chapter 6 explores the interplay of syntax, prosody, and body movements with pragmatic resources in turn organization in Mandarin conversation by analyzing the convergence and divergence of these multiple resources, and examining how the interaction displays in indicating the possible turn completion. Three examples are presented in illustrating the ways in which these resources interact with each other and work conjointly in projecting the same point of possible turn transition and completion. In terms of the divergence of resources, the analysis shows how multiple resources function in different ways and how certain resources override others to contextualize the possible turn completion in Mandarin conversation. The data indicates that divergent resources are organized based on their interactional salience in turn organization, and are produced equivocally in projecting possible turn completion.
Chapter 7 is a summary of the preceding four chapters which investigate the relevance to turn organization of syntactic features, prosody, and body movements, and their interaction with pragmatic resources. Additionally, the author points out the contribution of this book, as well as some implications for future studies in three areas: Conversation Analysis (CA), interactional linguistics and Chinese linguistics. The extension of this study can be implemented through various focuses, such as other more complex cases of turn transition, functions of these resources in institutional settings, the relationship between turn design and action formation, a cross-linguistic comparison of linguistic and visual cues in turn organization, etc.
EVALUATION
In sum, the book endeavors not only to explore the interactional function of syntax, prosody and body movements, but also to illuminate their complex interaction with pragmatic resources in face-to-face Mandarin turn organization. As the author points out, it might be difficult to generalize the findings of this study to all the situations where Mandarin conversation occurs because the study is based on the data the author collected. However, it provides readers with a window to understand natural Mandarin conversation from a holistic perspective, and with directions for future studies as well. On the other hand, much more effort is needed in illustrating Mandarin conversation since it is a complex language with many special structures, such as formulaic expressions, “ba” structures, etc. The issue of how these constructs interact with prosody, body movements and pragmatic resources is under-explored.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
My primary research interest is interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). I’m interested in pragmatic constructs ranging from speech acts to conversational implicatures, sentence final particles, address forms. Besides the production of pragmatic functions, I am also interested in the development of L2 learners’ perception of various pragmatic targets and what factors may influence this process.
Page Updated: 18-May-2015