Action Formation:A Conversation Analytic Study On Inference-embedded Polar Questions In Mandarin Chinese

Questions are readily accessible to everyone in language use.It is evidenced that questions are indispensable in many aspects of the social world,and are massively employed in almost every setting or context of social encounters.For instance,people are found to heavily rely on questions to accomplish ranges of social actions such as inviting,requesting and offering,as well as to manage and navigate many other affairs such as identity construction,business transaction,culture transmission,and social structure production and reproduction.It can thus be said that questions play a significant role in our daily life,helping to facilitate the running of social world,to maintain and promote social interactions,as well as to establish or sustain relationships.In these respects,research into questions by examining their occurrences in the primordial site of language use is consequential for us to appreciate the nature of the questions deployed in everyday life,that is,how they are employed and treated as normative ways for the accomplishment of social actions,for the management of social affairs,for the manoeuvring of social relations,as well as for the constitution of social organization.To establish the interactional relevance that the actual production of questions manifests,the key to research is to examine how questions are shaped on particular interactional occasions,and what they are exploited to address and achieve at those moments.Adopting conversation analysis,the current study focuses on the inference-embedded polar question occurring in mundane conversation in Mandarin Chinese.It is noticeable that the speaker producing this type of question embeds inference-making about what falls into the recipient’s epistemic domain in his or her turn construction.The question thus embodies the speaker’s epistemic stance.Inference-making matters to social interaction and it can be performed explicitly or implicitly in unfolding talk-in-interaction.A detailed examination of the production of the inference-embedded polar question indicates that a speaker’s inference-making is typically embedded in three ways in the data collection for the current research.Given that the regular occurrence of a speaker’s methods of inference-making embedding has some identifiable features in the corresponding turn’s composition,these methods are generally characterized as(1)proffering a candidate answer to a certain aspect regarding the recipient’s state of affairs;(2)proposing a possible absence or missing of a usual or common act regarding the recipient;and(3)formulating a provisional clarification of the prior talk.For convenience,they are further generalized as(1)candidate-answer-proffering questions(2)missing-act-proposing questions(3)clarification-formulating questions.Syntactically,these inference-embedded polar questions are constructed to seek confirmation or disconfirmation of the propositions referenced in the questions.Interactionally,it is found that embedding inference-making into polar questions in different fashions displays the speaker’s different orientations to what is addressed at a particular moment of ongoing talk,thus serving to achieve different interactional accomplishments.Based on these observations,the current study pays particular attention to how the inference-embedded polar question is packaged at a more granular level,as well as how these granular compositions are manipulated to orient to different interactional contingencies and to the accomplishment of different social actions.Through repeated and prudent case-by-case analyses of the ways in which a speaker performs his or her inference-making on different occasions,this dissertation makes the following main arguments:(1)The candidate-answer-proffering question offers a guessing or an assessment of the likely state of affairs regarding the recipient from the perspective of the speaker,and is found to be deployed as a practice of seeking information about the actuality of what is involved at the moment regarding the recipient.Such analysis is grounded on what Sacks(Fall 1964: 22)has put: “using a range of classes,you can refer to one member to get another member”.Specifically,the interactional contributions that are made by a speaker and a recipient in their selecting to compose the turns at the moment noticeably demonstrate that they are reflexively connected in their membership categories.(2)The missing-act-proposing question is packaged as a practice of eliciting an account from the recipient.This is concluded by virtue of the observation that this type of turn design is produced to address what runs counter to the speaker’s previously established knowledge by proposing an absence of a certain usual or common act,thus being built to elicit an account for the discrepancy from the recipient.(3)The clarification-formulating question is shaped to initiate a repair on the prior talk,targeting different aspects of the trouble source in an informing sequence.This is due to the speaker’s displayed orientation to the issue of intersubjectivity in unfolding interaction.By tentatively clarifying the prior talk,the speaker shows that the talk-so-far has caused him or her trouble in understanding a certain aspect in the prior speaker’s talk,thus serving to do other initiation of repair.While inference embedded in these polar questions embodies the speakers’ epistemic stance of being knowledgeable about what falls into the recipients’ epistemic domain,this study argues that epistemic certainty implied in the speakers’ knowledge claim through inference-making performed in the afore-mentioned three ways varies.This is observably manifested in the speakers’ question designs with respect to their orientations to what they select to address,and to how they finely calibrate the nuances in packaging their inference-making to accomplish a particular social action at each situated interactional locus.All boil down to the demonstrable manipulation that the speakers,according to their knowledge base or access,monitor the composition and the polarity of their turns in minute detail.Specifically,comparing those three ways of inference-making embedding suggests that the candidate-answer-proffering question displays the speaker’s relatively lower epistemic certainty,while the missing-act-proposing question embodies the speaker’s fairly stronger epistemic certainty.By contrast,certainty that is exhibited in and through the clarification-formulating question is the strongest among the three types.The current study thus argues that action formation of the inference-embedded polar question is not only determined by the speaker’s maneuvering of granularity of the question on particular occasions,but also is informed by dimensions of epistemics.Making an inquiry into regular occurrence of the inference-embedded polar question,or rather the regular ways of a speaker’s inference-making embedding in the data collection,this dissertation does not claim that there is a single,determinate relationship between each packaging of the polar question and the action it is composed to execute,but aims to report an observation of certain regular occurrences in and through actually organized talk-in-interaction,and seeks to develop an analysis of their interactional imports.The findings in the current study highlight the point that speakers may select a specific grammatical resource in such a way to display their analyses of the talk-so-far,to define here-and-now situation of ongoing talk,as well as to shape the ensuing development of the talk.Through the analysis of what speakers are doing in performing their inference-making systematically through candidate-answer-proffering questions,missing-act-proposing questions,and clarification-formulating questions at particular moments,this study demonstrates that speakers themselves treat the inference-embedded polar question as an interactional resource that is sensitive to local interactional contingencies.What is embedded into the question is contingent on multiple intricately woven factors,such as what precedes it,what the speaker selects to address at the moment,how the speaker orients to the locality of dynamically unfolding conversation,and how the speaker manoeuvres epistemics by performing inference-making in different fashions.By tactically manipulating all these factors,the speaker displays his or her orientations to the issue of “why that now” that is the core concern of doing conversation analysis.Grounding action formation of the inference-embedded polar question in its actual deployment,the current study suggests that the speaker’s attentiveness to the subtle connection between how a particular grammatical resource is finely packaged at its granular level and the action that it is composed to execute matters in talk-in-interaction.This contributes to our understanding of the interplay between grammar and social action,and constitutes one underlying force that sustains the production of turns-at-talk and the abstract social organization that these turns entail.Furthermore,the findings in the present study may provide some perspectives for the existing body of wok on polar questions and deepen our interpretation of polar questions as an adaptation to and for talk-in-interaction.Bringing together various packagings of the polar question that the current study focuses on affords us an opportunity to identify their commonalities and differences in their actual accomplishments in and through talk,or rather,through empirical examination,it hopes to develop an account for the interactional realization of the inference-embedded polar question in Mandarin Chinese.This account may be helpful in uncovering the observable commonalities that feature in the configurations of these questions on the one hand,and in analyzing the uniqueness of each question design on the other hand;in interpreting the particulars of the actual implementation of actions in situ on the one hand,and in extracting the formal properties that can be used to academic analysis on the other hand.