Negotiating Interpersonal Meanings

A tendency can be traced from the recent studies on speech acts-a combination of context-specific, interactive-construed, and relational-oriented approach. That is, more and more researchers show interest in the interactive speech act realization pattern within specific context. Their focus is no longer on the speech act per se, but more on negotiation or orientation of interpersonal meanings manifested in the characteristics of speech act realization. This thesis, positioned in the direction of such efforts, explores the negotiation of the interpersonal meanings in the IIMM requestive transactions at work between the Chinese co-workers of equal working status. The research object is the requestive transactions. The research is aimed at finding out the characteristics of speech act realization in this particular context and extraordinary technological medium and at finding out the interpersonal meanings mapped on these characteristics.Blum-Kulka et al's (1989) coding scheme and conversation analysis have been adopted for analyzing the requestive transactions from three aspects: opening, requestive and closing exchanges. The data are qualitatively attended to and at the same time collaboratively analyzed by the quantitative methods.The results show that the Chinese co-workers of equal status tend to orient the interpersonal meanings to task-directed solidarity in the course of requestive realization. A dilemma has also been found while describing the interpersonal meanings negotiated between the equals either in terms of 'autonomy' or in terms of 'solidarity'. In this light, it is proposed that in between interpersonal meanings of 'autonomy' and 'solidarity', there is not a gap but rather a continuum, where the interpersonal meanings negotiated on the dimension of pragmatic distance drifts along.The present study further testifies the bilateral nature of linguistic communication: informational and interpersonal. Blum-Kulka et al.'s (1989) coding scheme has also been demonstrated as applicable, on the whole, to analyze Chinese interactive data, though due to the idiosyncracy of Chinese and its communicative...