A Study On Conversational Repair From The Perspective Of Rapport Management

Conversational repair, a common conversational phenomenon, is inevitablewhen people communicate with each other in daily life. There are some communicative barriers in human contact because the process ofpeople communicating with others is not always smooth. In order to make the conversation move on, people adopt different types of conversational repairs according to different communicative contexts. However, as a social behavior, conversational repair is affected by some social factors. Most of the scholars focused on the form organization of conversational repair in the previous researches, while few people studied the relationship between conversational repair and social factors.Brown & Levinson’s face theory and Leech’s polite principle are the important part of polite theory study. However, all the discussion of their researches focuses on speakers from a personal viewpoint. The rapport management of Helen Spencer-Oatey is a theory which not only studyindividual manners but analyzing social factors.According to Helen Spencer-Oatey, rapport management includes two parts—face and rights. These two parts consist of four core elements: quality face, social identity face, equity rights and association rights. Quality face means communicators hope to get a positive review in the aspect of personal quality, such as ability, intelligence, appearance and behavior. Social identity face means that people hopeto obtain positive evaluation about their identity. Equity rights mean that people believe that they have rights to be respected and fairly treated. Others should not impose their orders on communicative subjects when communicating with others. Association rights meanthat communicators have rights to associate with others in certain relation.In the thesis, three questions will be solved:(1) Which kind of conversational repair type is adopted most frequently in each model of rapport management?(2) What are the factors that can influence the use of conversational repair?(3)What pragmatic functions does conversational repair possess in such circumstances?The thesis is based on conversation analysis, with qualitative research being involved. It aims to study conversational repair from the perspective of rapport management which was proposed by Helen Spencer-Oatey. The data source of the study is extracted from Modern Family(Season Ⅲ), which is one of the popular American sitcoms. The research studies the repair phenomenon in Modern Familyto try to indicate the relationship between social factors and conversational repair. Moreover, it sums up the pragmatic functions of conversational repair. The functions are saving face, restoring relations, avoiding conflicts and defusing awkward situations.The thesis is the study of conversational repair from the perspective of rapport management. Different rapport management models lead to different types of conversational repairs. Therefore, the use of conversational repairs is affected by social factors. Conversational repairs’ pragmatic functions enrich conversational repair study.They are helpful to the study of second language acquisition. However, there are also limitations in this study. If the data were collected from the real life, it would be more convincing. The study would be more valuable if there are enough data and quantitative researchesareconducted.