Speech Reporting In Conversations And Interactive Discourse Roles

Based on 461 instances of speech reporting from 18 Chinese modern drama texts, this thesis is an attempt to study speech reporting in conversational discourse with combined approaches of discourse roles and conversation analysis. Different from the traditional studies of it, speech reporting in the present study has been defined as an action as well as a process, thus breaking the barrier between the reported speech and its utterer. The major aim is to reveal and elaborate the interactive relationship between different discourse roles in speech reporting. The whole thesis has been divided into the following parts:Firstly, roughly following Thomas(1991, forthcoming)'s categorization of discourse roles, the author points out that speech reporting is one of the means of switching the "unmarked" role of speaker to the "marked" role (mouthpiece, spokesperson and reporter), but it is by no means the only one. Then the role of author has been identified and with the message-introducer as well as the speaker's social role being the two criteria, three "marked" roles have been distinguished. The statistics show that the occurrence rate of the reporter role is far higher than the other two roles.Secondly, for a better revealing of the interactive relationship between the roles, the author has had a scrutiny of the conversations in which speech reporting occurs and has given a systematic account of the conditions that trigger speech reporting. In our data, it is found that speech reporting can be triggered by the hearer, the hearer-author and the speaker himself, whereas among these the overwhelming majority belongs to the speaker-initiation. The relative position of the message and the message-introducer has also been examined and it again proves that the speaker and the hearer co-construct the conversational structure of speech reporting.Thirdly, self-initiated speech reporting has been approached from the pragmatic perspective. To achieve different functions of the intentional speech reporting, the speaker manipulates the relationship between the roles of the author and the hearer as choices of strategies by way of manipulating the author's power over the hearer, overlapping the roles of author and hearer and imitating the way the author speaks.