An Analysis Of Turn-takings In Wuthering Heights From The Sociolinguistic Perspective

With the development of sociolinguistically oriented discourse analysis, the relationship between power and turn-taking has received much attention in recent years. Wuthering Heights is recognized as one of the world-famous books. It contains many dialogues and is suitable as text for study of turn-taking. There is rare research to apply turn-taking analysis on written discourse of novels. Thus, this paper tries to analyze of the employment of turn-taking in the novel Wuthering Heights from the sociolinguistic perspective to explore how turn-taking patterns are conditioned by power including social class and gender.Based on the turn-taking system which an important part of conversational analysis theory, this study analyzes the turn-taking use in Wuthering Heights from the sociolinguistic perspective. The research questions of the study are:(1) if the person who has power always control the turn-taking in Wuthering Height?(2) How can turn-taking reflect the power relations in Wuthering Height?(3) What turn-taking strategies are used by characters in Wuthering Height?In this study, turn-takings in Wuthering Heights is analyzed from sociolinguistic perspective to examine the relationship between power and turn-taking. The study is carried out in the following stages: firstly, 6 pairs of characters chosen are divided into three groups. And the power relations between each pair that conclude class and gender are interpreted as social variables; secondly, the two-party conversations between the above 6 pairs in the novel are collected as texts or samples, and the typical turn-taking features in these texts such as turn-length, initiation, interruption and turn-skip are identified as linguistic variables;thirdly, the data is analyzed both though linking the social variables and linguistic variables quantitatively and through analyzing the samples qualitatively.The results of the analysis show that power indeed exerts great impact on turn-taking and to a large extent the person who has power controls the turn-taking. Besides, turn-taking can reflect the power relations between two participants. Finally, the results suggest that persons can use different turn-taking strategies to achieve their purposes.