Structural Study And Realization Of Politeness In Conversations Between Customers And Shop Assistants In China

Spoken discourse analysis has become the current trend in pragmatics. Spokendiscourse analysis has covered various topics. This thesis takes conversations betweencustomers and shop assistants as its subject, with the aim of working out a structureand linguistic characteristics of the conversations by analyzing materials collectedfrom naturally occurring events. The study starts from analyzing materials obtained from buying and sellingcontexts. The thesis first makes a brief introduction of Sinclair-Coulthard's model ofconversations between teachers and pupils at class, which are composed of five ranks,lesson, transaction, exchange, move and act. The lesson is the highest rank and the actis the lowest rank. Sinclair and Coulthard's methods are employed in conversationsbetween Chinese customers and shop assistants. It turns out that conversationsbetween customers and shop assistants are tightly structured and are also made up offive ranks: interaction, transaction, exchange, move and act. Politeness, as a universal human property, plays a key role in conversationsbetween customers and shop assistants. Both customers and shop assistants need topay attention to each other's face wants. Customers' positive face and negative faceare not invariable during an interaction, therefore shop assistants have to be aware ofthe changes. Otherwise, customers' faces might be threatened and dealings cannotcontinue. To guarantee the smooth ongoing of dealings, shop assistants will adoptvarious politeness strategies to protect customers' faces. Meanwhile, customers haveto do some face threatening acts such as refusals and requests. They will strategicallyperform these speech acts and mitigate face threatening forces. This paper consists of six chapters. Chapter one is the introduction, giving the motivation of choosingconversations between customers and shop assistants as the topic and the problems tobe solved. Chapter two provides an overview of theories on discourse analysis. Chapter three is methodology, introducing data collection of all the materials. Chapter four first introduces Sinclair and Coulthard's model of discoursebetween teachers and pupils at class, and then discusses the structure of conversationsbetween Chinese customers and shop assistants. Chapter five introduces politeness principles and witnesses the discussion ofcustomers and shop assistants' face wants. And then language features of theconversations under the impact of politeness principles are listed in this chapter. Finally, chapter six gives a brief summary of the paper.