A Conversation Analysis Of Invitation In Mandarin Chinese Ordinary Conversation

In daily life,conversationists most use language to carry out a social action so as to achieve the purpose of communication and interaction.As a specific social action,invitation exists in daily communication universally.In order to perform it successfully,conversationists have to design their talk-in-interaction and make it meet certain rules and conditions.People have done some researches about invitation.But they usually do the research from the perspectives of pragmatics and cross-cultural study,and utilize speech act theory,politeness principle and face theory.No matter which theory,they are based on the western cultural perspective.Some maxims they put forward are not fully applicable in Chinese culture.Moreover,the data which are used in pragmatics are not naturally occurring conversations.It will hinder to generate universal regularity.Conversation analysis which is developed in the 1960 s uses naturally occurring conversations to study sequence organization and turn design in talk-in-interaction and the performance of social action.It provides a new perspective to study invitation.The present research collects daily conversation about invitation in more than 5000 minutes natural recordings and analyzes the data with conversation analysis.It mainly includes two parts: the sequence organization and turn design.In the first part,we analyze three responses to invitation,two forms of invitation sequence and three kinds of invitation expansions.In the second part,we generalize three sentence categories which are used to issue an invitation and four pursuing practices which are adopted by the inviter.On the basis of these regularities,we also discuss their communication functions.All in all,these regularities reveal the organization and the complexity of human communication.And it also shows that human communication which seems to be messy is actually rule-based.