A Turn-taking Approach To The Analysis Of Characters In The Works Of Alice Munro

Alice Munro, the Canadian authoress and the winner of Nobel Prize in literature, 2013, is distinguished for presenting Canadian women’s dilemma in life from her insightful female perspective. Her magnum opus Runaway, created in 2004, has obtained numerous awards, such as Giller Prize and Booker Prize since its publishment. Both foreign and domestic scholars have explored Munro’s works from the perspective of stylistics, feminism and post-modernism. However, quite few researches on Munro’s works have been carried out from the perspective of pragmatics.Conversation analysis is an essential branch of pragmatics and its most significant contributions are derived from the ethnomethodological works of Harvey Sacks, together with Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. Based on long-term studies on daily conversations, Harvey Sacks proposes turn-taking mechanism and then linguists such as Levinson, Gillian Brown and George Yule revise the theory with different ideas, proving the significance of turn-taking theory at the same time. Turn-taking mechanism has drawn attention of scholars from different fields since been proposed. In 1980 s, with the development of drama-stylistics, turn-taking mechanism is found to be very useful in analyzing conversations in literature. Yu Dongming, who proposes the turn-taking framework for drama analysis, points out that turn-taking, as one of the important categories of discourse analysis, is often utilized to explain the power relationships and depict the personalities of characters.This thesis aims at revising the conventional turn-taking framework from four respects, so that it can be utilized to analyze written conversations in literature works. On the basis of the revised turn-taking framework, the thesis studies the representative conversations in Alice Munro’s story collection Runaway to make analysis of characters’ characteristics and relationships. The statistical tables of the turn-taking framework are more scientific and convenient for better analysis of both in a quantitative way calculating the data of turns of each character and a qualitative approach to analyzing turns by applying induction and deduction. Besides, the verification of the analysis results by self-determination theory, which belongs to psychology, provides an innovative way to enhance the degree of reliability of turn-taking analysis. Turn-taking mechanism offers the literature studies a new-constructed frame to effectively comprehend the characterization of characters created by writers.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first part presents a brief introduction of the research background, methodology, purpose and significance of the thesis. The second part summarizes the literature review of turn-taking and Alice Munro, together with her story collection Runaway. The third part illustrates the revised turn-taking framework which serves as the theoretical framework of the thesis. The fourth part, which is the most important part of the thesis, is the analysis of conversations revealing characters’ characteristics and interpersonal relationships in story collection Runaway. The last part is a conclusion of major findings and limitations of the study.