Power And Turn-Taking A Sociolinguistic Analysis Of Conversations In Oliver Twist

With the development of sociolinguistically oriented discourse analysis, the relationship between power and turn-taking has received much attention in recent years. The study of turn-taking from a sociolinguistic perspective is of great significance for our successful management of social interaction, but it is a still a realm that seems to have more promises than accomplishments. Regarding the influence of power on turn-taking and the function of turn-taking to construct power, there are numerous hypotheses which await systematic inquiries.Based on earlier research on power and turn-taking and sociolinguistic theories of conversational analysis, the study concentrates on the interrelationship between power and turn-taking, incorporating the new ideas of multidimensional grid of social relationship and polysemy of turn-taking. Through a sociolinguistic analysis of conversations in Oliver Twist, it aims to explore the influence of multidimensional power on turn-taking and the polysemous functions of turn-taking to construct social relations.In the study, literary conversations were analyzed in a sociolinguistic way that combined both quantitative and qualitative elements. The study was carried out in the following stages: firstly, 5 pairs of characters in multidimensional power were chosen, and the complex power relations between each pair that comprised status discrepancy, social distance and feeling involvement were identified as social variables; secondly, the two-party conversations between the above pairs throughout the novel were collected as texts or samples, and the typical turn-taking features in the texts such as turn-length, initiation, interruption and turn-skip were identified as linguistic variables; thirdly, the data were analyzed both through linking the social and linguistic variablesquantitatively and through examining the samples qualitatively, and the results were interpreted in the sociolinguistic frameworks.The results of the study show that turn-taking control is conditioned not only by the status discrepancy between participants but also by their social distance/feeling involvement, and at the same time is used to construct various social relations. The interrelationship between multidimentional power and turn-taking in the process of conversation can be fully accounted for in the sociolinguistic frameworks, and in turn indicates the importance of a sociohnguistic perspective in linguistics in that it contributes to a better understanding of the nature of language, that is, language use is essentially a social phenomenon, influenced by social contexts and also used to serve social functions.