A Study Of The Turn-taking Pattern In Automobile Sales Discourse

Commercial transaction is an issue that people should deal with every day, and buying and selling constitute the modern economic society. Each of us can be a salesman or a customer, we can sale or buy 5 cents candy, and we still can sale or buy several million house or car if we can. But being a salesman or a customer, buying candy or car is totally different. This thesis uses Sacks’ classic turn-taking model to analyze automobile sales language, in order to testify whether this model could suit the automobile sales language or not, to analyze the differences between auto salesmen and customers in using turn-taking strategies and the pragmatic factors for those differences. The author recorded 15 Chinese conversations between auto salesmen and customers, and picked 5 of them at random to transcribe into English to analyze.The result of the research shows that the turn-taking model proposed by Sacks et al is suitable in the conversation between automobile sales and customers as well. From the five automobile sales transcripts, turn-yielding is the most frequent used strategy in the three strategies except transcript two. From the distribution of the three strategies in sales and customers we conclude that turn-yielding of customer takes up 60% of the whole, the salesman’s turn-holding takes up 70% of the whole, turn-claiming between salesman and customer is almost the same, and the turn-claiming of customer is relatively higher than salesman. The restraining factors of the different choices between automobile sales and customers are the specific sales background, different purpose in the conversations and Grice’s cooperative principle and Leech’s politeness principle.The findings of the research benefit the readers’ knowledge of the characteristics of sales language, especially the differences of turn-taking between the automobile sales and customers, which enable researchers’ further understanding of automobile sales language. And at the same time, it offers specific guidance about how to make sales reach the sales goal with turn-taking strategies.