A Pragmatic Study On Deliberate Topic Change

Topic is an essential part of conversational structure, and its organization thus influences the joint construction of meaning, although it does not contribute any conceptual meaning in itself. It can be extended and evaluated when being proposed, and most importantly, it is the subject or focus of the conversation no matter what constructions it has, i.e. it can be constituted of words, phrases, sentences or even turns. Where there is a group of people, there is a topic. In recent years, many researchers have been interested in some linguistic phenomena, such as cohesion, turn-taking and deixis, but few of them involve topic, let alone topic change.This thesis is a pragmatic analysis of the deliberate use of topic change in verbal communication. Methodologically speaking, it belongs to a qualitative study based on the data collected from literary works, TV series, and daily conversation. It is both data-driven and theory-driven. Without any present model in mind or hypotheses proposed in advance, the whole investigation begins with the collecting of data, and then categorizes them. After doing these, we carry out a careful observation, seek the reasons behind this special language behavior, and then trace the model of topic change to generalize the pragmatic functions of topic change. The theoretical framework of the present study is constructed on Jef Verschueren's theory of linguistic adaptation (Verschueren, 1999). The present research concentrates on the adaptability, negotiability and functions of topic change.In a casual conversation, topic is not unchangeable. Language users not only have the ability to produce or interpret discourse with respect to a given topic, they are also able to change a topic and to perceive such a topic change in a discourse or conversation. Actually topic change is a commonplace in our daily life.However, as a strategy of communication, on the one hand, topic changeis a process of a highly conscious and purposeful behavior ------ linguisticchoices from different levels of language structure. The working definition is"In verbal interaction, the speaker deliberately discontinues the present topic but rather employs a new topic which has little or no relevance to the present one so as to maintain the conversation process to meet certain communicative needs. In this case, the topic change is called Deliberate Topic Change. ". But why do people do like this? Through careful observation of the data, it has been found out that topic change is chosen to adapt to various contextual factors. The research findings indicate that topic change is used to adjust to social conventions, psychological motivations and physical contexts. As a matter of fact, the choice of topic change is the result of linguistic adaptation.On the other hand, we still need to make it clear that how topic change is used in verbal interaction, which is also the second core of this study. The research shows that the speaker needs to choose a proper linguistic structure, which can carry out his or her strategy. According to the data collected, turn-taking, which is used to classify the dynamic process of topic change, is actually not the decisive factor of topic change, that is, topic change may occur at the same turn or different turns. Therefore topic change can firstly be divided into self-change and other-change according to turn-taking, and further on the basis of the relations between the new topic and the present one, topic change can be subdivided into four types:a). Self-turn full-change: the new topic is different completely from the present one in meaning when changing at the same turn.b). Self-turn part-change: the new topic is related to the present topic in meaning when changing, that is, the present topic has been changed to its sub topic at the same turn.c). Other-turn full-change: the new topic is different completely from the present one when changing at the different turns.d). Other-turn part-change: the new topic is the sub topic of the present one when changing at the different turns.Furthermore, the variability and negotiability of topic change are shown through the speaker's manipulation of language.