Fǎnzhèng(反正) In Mandarin Chinese Conversations

In Mandarin Chinese,fǎnzhèng(反正)is one of the most common adverbs which participants utilize in their conversations.Few researchers have analyzed fǎnzhèng in daily interactions and no research has been undertaken from the perspective of conversation analysis yet.The most common circumstance where fǎnzhèng is used is ordinary interactions.Therefore,it is essential to study fǎnzhèng in daily conversations.As a research methodology,conversation analysis explores the organization and orderliness of the social interaction of the real world by examining details in talk-in-interaction.This thesis aims to find out where and how fǎnzhèng is deployed in Mandarin Chinese conversations from the angle of conversation analysis.Our research also wants to provide a new perspective to study fǎnzhèng.The data collected for this research all come from the audio recordings of naturally occurring everyday dyadic conversations in Mandarin Chinese.This thesis includes two major parts.The first part is about the sequential position of fǎnzhèng.We analyze the placement of fǎnzhèng in the overall sequential organization and the placement within the turn constitutional unit where fǎnzhèng occurs.The data manifests that fǎnzhèng is mainly positioned in two ways,self-generated and interactionally-generated.Fǎnzhèng shows the flexibility of its placement within the TCU.The second part is about the communicative function of fǎnzhèng,and this part is integrated with the analysis of the sequential positions of fǎnzhèng.In the present study,it is found and proved that fǎnzhèng is utilized to serve as a ‘my side’ perspective display token.In this research,we classify this communicative function into two types: the strong version and the weak version.We will elaborate on this specific communicative function by analyzing and displaying the participants’ own displayed understandings and orientations.In a word,conversation analysis is a powerful methodology for us to find out where and how a particular phenomenon appears in our conversations to reveal the orderliness in daily interactions.Through analyzing fǎnzhèng in Mandarin Chinese conversations,the regularities concluded can be instructive to participants when they produce or recognize actions and the findings may be helpful for them to have a better understanding of each other in social interactions.