A Structural Study And Realization Of Politeness In Chinese Real-estate Salesperson's Discourse

Spoken discourse analysis has become the current trend in linguistics. This thesis takes discourse of the real-estate salesperson as its subject, with the aim of working out a structure and linguistic characteristics of the discourse by analyzing data collected from naturally occurring events. According to the research questions, this thesis mainly adopts a qualitative method, with quantitative method as supplement. The real-estate sales discourse is analyzed from two aspects:In the first part, Tsui's revised model of three-part exchange is exploited to describe the local structure of the real-estate sales promotion discourse. Findings reveal that three-part exchanges (initiating move - responding move - follow-up move) form the main part of the discourse. Besides, four-part exchange structure and challenging moves also exist, though only a few.In the second part, "the other-centered" politeness model is used to analyze the salesperson's politeness. The theoretical model is composed of two layers: the first layer consists of two guiding principles, i.e. the principle of respectfulness and the principle of closeness; the second layer is the implementing principle, i.e. the principle of satisfaction. The implementing principle has different manifestations according to different guiding principles. Findings show that the salesmen and salesgirls exhibit differences in selecting guiding politeness principles in different stages. The salesmen are consistent in adopting the principle of respectfulness while the salesgirls first adopt the principle of respectfulness and then adopt the principle of closeness during the interaction. The gender difference in adopting different politeness guiding principles is because of the fact that the salesmen and salesgirls focus on different aspects of the customers' psychological needs.Besides, turn-taking in real-estate sales conversation presents dynamic features. It's because the participants' information gap, roles and their goals are dynamic instead of being static.The real-estate selling discourse is rarely explored in domain of business discourse; however, its research importance cannot be underestimated or neglected. The present research is merely a small part of the analysis on the real-estate discourse. The findings of this thesis cannot apply to all the real-estate selling events due to limited amount of data. The discourse of this type is still awaiting much exploration in future studies.