Diaphonic Repetition In Telephone Conversation: A Contrastive Study Between Chinese And American Students

The research in the paper is motivated by the growing awareness that telephone speakers employ adaptive strategies to match his interlocutors. A typical aim here is to gain a better understanding of cross-cultural communication through a comparative study of diaphonic repetition in Chinese and American students' telephone conversations. Diaphonic repetition is an immediate reaction or feedback to an interlocutor's previous speech act in a conversational exchange. Telephone has been part of our everyday communication and deserves extensive study. Successful telephone conversations require both speakers' concerted efforts to generate understanding. Diaphonic repetition is salient in telephone conversation, for it serves as a meaning-making strategy for the interlocutors to achieve a successful conversation and build relationship. Although a few contrastive studies have been conducted on repetition response behavior in European languages, few contrastive studies have touched upon diaphonic repetition in non-European languages. The paper deals with Chinese and American students' telephone conversations to better understand the use of diaphonic repetition strategies, discover similarities- and differences between the two groups, and relate the findings to their different cultural backgrounds. Relying primarily on recordings and transcriptions, the paper examines the interpersonal meanings of diaphonic repetition and its frequency and distribution in our data. The analysis shows that telephone speakers of both languages adopt diaphonic repetition as a meaning-making strategy to enhance interpersonal relationship and accomplish social goals. However, the distribution of diaphonic repetition in the two sets of data is different. While Americans prefer to use diaphonic repetition as a sign of agreement or confirmation, Chinese prefer to use it to show participation instead of agreement or they mix both to implicit their intention. The difference attributes to the fact that people from different cultures give priority to different values in the telephone conversation. American students are more straightforward and regard sincerity as the basis to establish a successful conversation, whereas Chinese appear to be more solidarity-based and oriented more towards co-participants' positive face. They take harmony as the basis of a successful conversation. The research contributes to our knowledge of diaphonic repetition in Chinese and English and also to our understanding of pragmatic transfer as a possible cause for pragmatic failure.