A Comparative Study Of"Fishing" Device

Language is the most important communication tool. Especially in modern world, communication has become an indispensable part in both work and life. Consequently, human language is being more and more concerned. People, in different settings, get in touch with different people and talk about different topics every day, which makes the form of language diverse. Some utterances can be said directly, however, some must be expressed indirectly. And the interesting phenomenon of expressing indirectly is the theme to be discussed in the present study.The author observes that both in daily communication and institutional conversation speakers usually attempt to induce listeners to speak out what they want to know indirectly rather than directly, especially when topics involve sensitive and private issues or some information that is not appropriate to say directly. The insidious or indirect way to induce others’information is called "’fishing" device in the present research. Until now, studies using Conversation Analysis (CA for short) to discuss this subject are seldom, which prompts the author to choose "fishing" as her subject.Based on CA developed by Sacks and his colleagues, this thesis mainly analyzes "fishing" in daily conversation and in institutional conversation from aspects of turn design and conversational repair. Combined with observation of data, it is found that "fishing" others’information is realized by two ways usually:the first method is turn design. The discussion of turn design mainly includes speakers’intention and turn construction. Speakers" intention refers to the information that speakers want to know. The common traps of turn construction include fulfilling turns and repeating turns. The second way is conversational repair. In common sense, it means that listeners modify utterance mistakes made by speakers unconsciously. However, in the research of "fishing" in this thesis, conversational repair is that speakers intentionally make some obvious mistakes to bait listeners to repair the wrong or impropriate information. Usually, repairing is a process of providing new information. The key point of conversation repair relies on that speakers always give some exaggerated or random information. The two methods are main findings of the present research.In addition, the author also compares features of turn design and conversational repair represented in daily conversation and institutional conversation and finds out similarities and differences between them. The significance of this thesis is to strengthen language sensibility and help people to understand and choose appropriate language to achieve their communicative aims smoothly.