A Study Of The Main Female Characters' Personalities In Moment In Peking From The Perspective Of Conversation Analysis

Conversation analysis (CA) was first put forward by Harvey Sacks and his co-workers, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson in the 1960s. Until the late 1980s,with the rapid development of drama-stylistics, linguists began to explore power relations and characterization in literature works through CA approach. The existing literature has proved the effectiveness of CA approach to the analysis of characters'personalities and relationships.Moment in Peking is one of the most famous English works written by Lin Yutang. Many scholars have studied this masterpiece from various perspectives,among which some discussions are about the female characters in Moment in Peking.However, until now, research about the female characters in this novel from the perspective of CA has not been touched upon. Therefore, based on CA approach, this thesis focuses on the main female characters in Moment in Peking.The theory of CA consists of two basic notions, turn-taking system and sequence organization. The organization of turn-taking is fundamental to conversation;analyzing turn-taking is a significant part in conversation analysis. Investigating turn data, including turn length, turn type and turn-taking strategies etc., is proved to be scientific and objective in examining how conversations are unfolded in novels.In order to achieve the objectives of this study, the author comes up with three major research questions, probing into how turn-taking rules work in analyzing the conversations of the three main female characters in Moment in Peking, how female characters construct their identities in conversations and what personalities can be observed. In the process of selecting conversation materials concerning the three female characters, the author chooses conflict talk as a target and collects all their conflict talks, resulting in a rather close and complete corpus. Based on self-collected corpus, the author, adopting the quantitative method, applies the turn-taking analytic framework to explore turn data in detail, and reveals power relations in conversations and personalities of the three main female characters.Accordingly, the author draws the conclusion: CA is an effective approach to exploring female characters' personalities in Moment in Peking. Through conversation analysis of the conflict talks concerning Yao Mulan, the author finds that, on one hand,she has many fine qualities, such as kindness, courage and intelligence; on the other hand, she observes closely the feudal ethics. New Suyun's conflict talks manifest her egocentrism and arrogance; her terrible interpersonal relationships are bound up with her arrogant and aggressive temper. However the last two conflict talks display her patriotism and good nature. After analyzing Mannia's conflict talks, the author concludes that she is sentimental and dares to fight for her self-esteem.The present research enriches the application of conversation analysis theory, in particular turn-taking system, in literature works. By illustrating the turn-turning features in the conflict talks about the three female characters, this thesis provides a new perspective of understanding the female characters in Moment in Peking. Besides,through the exploration of turn-taking system, this thesis contributes to a better understanding of how to achieve smooth communication.