An Analysis Of Turn-taking In Free Debate Of International Varsity Debate

Debate contest is a fascinating linguistic phenomenon, which is usually regarded asone of the essences of language. In recent years, this speech event is enjoying more andmore popularity in Chinese universities. It can not only broaden college students’knowledge but also improve their ability of skillful manipulation of language. Free debate,as the climax part of debate contest, is much more charming and appealing, which isconsidered as “the essence of essence”. Therefore, it has aroused tremendous enthusiasmof many academics to study this distinctive language from various perspectives. Thepresent research mainly focuses on the analysis of turn-taking system in free debate ofInternational Varsity Debate, which may provide a new angle of view to appreciate thiswonderful speech event.Turn-taking model as the core part of conversation analysis was put forward by Sacksand his collaborators in1974, which was summarized on the basis of the analysis of dailyconversation. Based on the previous studies, this thesis has adopted turn-taking theory toanalyze20episodes of free debate of International Varsity Debate in order to explorespecific turn-taking rules and characteristics, and turn-control strategies in this speechevent. Firstly, this thesis has concretely analyzed the turn-constructional component ofeach turn in free debate and the distributions of these components and has accounted forsuch distributions. Secondly, through the analysis of the different episodes of InternationalVarsity Debate, it is revealed that the turn-taking rules of daily conversation are not fullyapplicable to free debate of debate contest, thus the author has attempted to make someappropriate revision to the rules and subsequently outlined a new turn-taking rules whichare more applicable to free debate. Finally, this thesis places the emphasis on theturn-control strategies including turn-claiming methods, turn-holding methods andturn-yielding methods employed in free debate, and then demonstrates the specificapplication and distribution of each strategy in free debate. With the characteristics ofdebate contest, the author has explored some reasons for such applications anddistributions.The application of turn-taking to free debate of International Varsity Debate is a tentative research. During the process of analyzing, the research adopts the integration ofqualitative and quantitative methods to sum up the turn-taking system in free debate. It ishoped that the current research may extend the research fields of turn-taking andcontribute to the development of Interactional Sociolinguistics. In addition, the currentresearch may also benefit the debaters in universities who might gain some deeper insightinto the debating language and some effective interactional strategies, thus improving thequality and enjoyment of debate contest in universities.