Conversation Analysis Under The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Generally speaking, conversation analysis means the profound study of conversation itself. Conversation analysis sets the general and trivial conversation as the scientific study target, and conducts a systematic and comprehensive research on the conversational rules. Pragmatics is the knowledge specializing in language using and understanding. Conversation is the most fundamental form of language application. Therefore it is one of the direct and concrete methods to conduct a systematic study and analysis on conversation itself and its application rules under the perspective of pragmatics.The study and analysis of conversation under the perspective of pragmatics not only helps us realize the speech communication rules and improve our oral communication ability, but also reveals the way we understand and master the world from the familiar yet unnoticed daily conversational phenomena, and uncovers the essence of language as well. This paper attempts to study conversation, under the perspective of pragmatics, statically (the study of conversational structure) and dynamically (the pragmatic meaning of conversation analysis). It observes in details the essence and rules of conversational activity and explores the inner motivation and cause for our using and choosing language during speech communication. Thus it conducts a reasonable analysis and interpretation, and discusses how we should use language to carry out an efficient communication to realize our communication purpose successfully. The main part of this paper consists of the following five parts:Chapter I briefly summarizes the generation and development process of conversation analysis. It first discusses the relation and difference between the three concepts of conversation, conversation analysis and discourse analysis. Then a general introduction is given to the current development and research findings of conversation analysis theory in the west, Russia and China.Chapter II conducts a static description of conversational structure from the perspective of pragmatics. The purpose of pragmatic study of conversational structure is to reveal the rule of conversational constitution and explain the continuity of conversation by exploring the sequential organization of natural conversation. This paper discusses conversational structure from two aspects. One is the whole description of conversation, mostly the study of the opening and closing for generalizing the whole characteristics of conversational structure. The other is the local description of conversation; this paper mainly describes the six local components, including turn-taking model, feedback, adjacency pair, repair, interruption and overlap, and it discusses the specific compositions of conversational structure and the relation and alternation rules between languages during the conversation.Chapter III conducts a dynamical study of discourse roles and the switching among them from the perspective of pragmatics. There are two kinds of discourse roles in the conversation: producers of talk and receivers of talk. Our discourse roles switch frequently during practical speech communication. Producers of talk and receivers of talk could switch between each other, so could the inner respective discourse roles of the two. Producers of talk usually switch in two ways: forward switch and reverse switch. When producers of talk switch along"mouthpiece→reporter→spokes-person→author→speaker", he carries an increasing responsibility for the discourse message to transmit and gets closer to the receiver of talk, and vice versa. The most common switches of receivers of talk are between addressee, auditor and bystander, and they could be categorized as active switch and passive switch. Discourse role switch is a pragmatic strategy that the bilateral communicators use to ensure successful communication. By employing this strategy, the communicator chooses the appropriate discourse role and gains an advantageous position during the communication. The pragmatic essence of this strategy is that the bilateral communicators escape direct clash by switching discourse roles, and thus build a harmonious relationship to carry on the communication for personal communication purpose.Chapter IV conducts a specific study of pragmatic ambivalence and conversational strategies in the conversation from the perspective of pragmatics. During the conversation, participators often employ conversational strategies to achieve a specific communication effect. In other words, the participator uses uncertain, vague or indirect speech in specific context to give the listener some subaudition or several subauditions in order to achieve some specific communication effect. The four methods usually adopted are pragmatic multivalence, pragmatic bivalence or plurivalence, conditional bivalent illocutionary act and discoursal ambivalence. On the opposite, the communicator usually employs conversational strategies to make his listener unable to carry out pragmatic multivalence understanding, or force the listener unable to communicate by discourse which could cause pragmatic multivalence. Usually adopted are the two conversational strategies of discourse level and context level. Pragmatic ambivalence and conversational strategies are used by participators to achieve an advantageous position during the conversation and make the conversation go toward their favorite way. It helps the communication go smooth with better effect to study and use pragmatic ambivalence and conversational strategies.Chapter V conducts a practical discussion of the situation when communicators obey or disobey principles of pragmatics. With a large portion of corpora, this paper focuses on two most important principles of the pragmatic principles: i.e. cooperative principle and politeness principle given the situation when communicators obey or disobey these two rules as well as the situation when communicators use the two rules as mutual complement. Cooperative principle and politeness principle are of great importance to pragmatics study. Both are complementary to each other during our daily conversation and act as a general guide to language use. Through studying how communicators use the two rules in the conversation, we could systematically and comprehensively study the essence of conversation analysis and reveal the internal law and practical significance of human speech communication.