The Variation Study Of Private Telephone Conversations Of A Chinese

The research in this paper is a study of the private telephone conversations of a Chinesewith the variation theory as the theoretical guide and Hymes' ethnography of speaking theoryas the framework for analysis. The aim for this research is to present the linguistic variants ofthe opening section, the body section and the closing section of the telephone conversation,toidentify the social variables that have the constraining influence on the linguistic variants, toexplore the variation between the landline phone conversation and the mobile phoneconversation in the opening section and to expose the social nature of language further. The telephone conversation analysis is a hot topic in the field of pragmatics and hascontributed a lot to the field of Conversation Analysis. There are many excellent works ontelephone conversation analysis in the pragmatic approach which focuses on the sequentialorganization of a telephone conversation. Although this research cannot be separated from theenlightenment of those previous studies, it employs a different perspective from them. That isthe variation study and the ethnographic analysis that are sociolinguisitic approaches. This research adopts the case study method as the major study framework. As for thespecific research methods, this research adopts the qualitative method as the major one with thequantitative method as the supplementary one. This is quite different from the traditionalvariation study with the quantitative method as the typical one. To adopt this method of study isunder the enlightenment of Coupland's Cardiff Study. And the consideration of thecomplexness of the language of Chinese and the practical research conditions is another reasonfor adopting this method. Based on the 60 telephone conversations that have been collected as the data from thesubject's large number of phone calls in two years, the presentation of the linguistic variants ofthe opening, the body and the closing sections of a telephone conversation is carried out. Thispaper is divided into six parts: I. Introduction, which is to introduce the brief history oftelephone conversation analysis and the aim, significance and the new points of this paper; II.Literature Review, which is to summarize the previous studies; III. Theoretical Framework, inwhich the Variation theory and the SPEAKING theory are presented; IV. Research method,which is to show the specific methods for collecting and analyzing data; V. Results andAnalysis, which is to present the description and the analysis of the linguistic variants of theopening, the body and the closing sections and the social variables that are influential on thelinguistic variants are identified. Among the eight components of Hymes' SPEAKING, theSetting and Scene, the Participants, the Ends , the Key and the Instrumentalities are the majorsocial variables that have the constraining influence on the linguistic variables; VI. Conclusion. In sum, this paper testifies the accommodation theory and expose the social nature oflanguage through the study of variation in the telephone conversations.