A Conversational Analysis Of Change Of State Particles In Mandarin Chinese

In daily communication, people engage in various kinds of activities:they ask and answer questions, they agree and disagree with each other, and they tell stories and provide feedback when listening to stories, for example. If we look at these activities closely, it soon becomes clear that parties to conversation do not merely accomplish these activities, but always accomplish them during a change-of-state.Scholars have done relatively a large number of investigations about particles from the following subject areas, for instance, grammatical study; pragmatic study; second language acquisitional study, conversation analysis and so on. But compared with these available literatures about particles, relatively little work has been done to analyze the change-of-state particles in Mandarin. An investigation of the change-of-state particles in Mandarin would be undertaken following the guideline of Conversation Analysis (hereafter CA) in the present research. All the data of this research are gathered from naturally-happening conversations in Chinese daily life. It is hoped that by observing and examining the collected data, we can discover the importance and effects for speakers to use particles in daily communication. The present research aims at finding out how the particles indicate a change of state, in what sense the particle plays an important role in the turn-taking system, and how the particle contributes to the progressing of a sequence. In particular, the use of two Mandarin particles, "en" and "le" are studied in this research.We notice that the particle "en" occurs in response to complete information giving and is placed at points at which the informings are possibly complete, therefore, "en" may be used by its producer along with additional turn components in various ways to a produce a more complex TCU. And the particle "en" also occupies positions in sequences where the professed aim is to obtain informing, to further inquire and to execute conversational repair. "En" in the aforementioned three sequential organizations displays a successful outcome of its producer’s change of state in the mind from not knowing to knowing. The particle "le", which can not be used by itself, is always added to the end of the sentence and co-occurs with the other linguistic components in the turn to fulfill the communicative function of state change. The structure "hai (still)-verb-’le’" indicates a change from a common-sense based guess to an observed fact. The structure "shi le" with a rising tone always changes from the mood of a statement to the mood that the speaker wants to make sure of the information again.Through analyzing the particles from Mandarin daily communication, the principles and theories involved in this research can be instructive to people when they use the particles in communication; meanwhile, the results drawn from this study may provide people with a possibility of a better understanding of each other and the maintenance of harmonious interpersonal relationship. What is more important, the present research manifests an innovative way to study the Mandarin, that is, form the perspective of Conversation Analysis.