A Conversation Analysis Of Sensitive Topics In Chinese Daily Conversation

We live in a communicative society, and social activities, which all humans must carry on, are built through communication. With the principle of "equal participation", people have stronger autonomy on the control of conversation turn design in daily conversation. Especially when sensitive topics are touched, much more complicated factors and variables are involved in analyzing and summarizing the rules of the daily conversation. Especially speaking, the above situation will become more obvious when sensitive topics are involved in daily conversation. This research aims at studying data related to sensitive topics in Chinese daily communication, focusing on studying the sequential structure of sensitive topics’ initiation, response, extension and termination in daily conversation and corresponding linguistic features of sensitive topics.With the help of the methodology of Conversation analysis, a sequential analysis of the sensitive topics in daily conversation is made on the basis of data collection and transcription and have basically drawn the following conclusions:First, sensitive topics are generally initiated in the form of a question and usually nominated by the initiators, who aim at meeting their two needs:initiating aspirations and satisfying curiosity. Secondly, the response to a sensitive topic has an important impact on the development of turn-talking after topic initiates. As the two sides abide by the principle "equal participation" in daily communication, the responding side can choose a variety of response strategies to avoid sensitivity of the topic by adopting negative feedbacks, or ending the topic with extreme ways. Third, the initiators of the topic also mainly dominate the expansion of a sensitive topic. In general, when facing negative feedbacks of the responding side, the initiators will tend to constantly reformulate the topics to get more information and satisfy their communicative purpose. But the dominance of topic extension is not static, sometimes the responding side will initiate a sensitive topic to the original initiator. When this case happens, the dominance of topic extension will be changed. Forth, viewing from the form of turn-talking, most sensitive topics use the dispreferred organization.This research aims to reveal objective regularity of sensitive topics in daily conversation, to help people pay further attention to communicative approach in social communication, to make a better verbal communication environment and to improve the harmonious development of interpersonal relationship.