Study On The Characterization Of Chen Bi’s Personalities Based On The Turn-taking Theory

Since the proposal of the systematics of Turn-taking Theory by Sacks and his colleagues in the 1970 s,the theory has attracted much attention from conversational analysts.Research on the Turn-taking Theory abroad mainly focuses on the universality of the theory among all languages,the projectability of possible turn completions,reactive tokens,as well as revisions or criticisms to the systematics by Sacks,et al.Moreover,apart from research and studies on the theory itself,the theory has been extended from taking daily conversations and studying the turn characteristics of conversation participants,to the study of turns in other institutional conversations.Having been introduced into China by Yan Huang in the 1980 s,the theory has witnessed rapid development in China.In addition to studies on the theoretical framework and the mechanism of the theory,Chinese conversational analysts have also employed the theory to the analysis on the power relations and characterization of characters in drama stylistics.They have also further extended the application of the theory to TV series and literature works.However,most studies of both home and abroad are focusing on English while the research on the applicability of the theory on Chinese is far from being sufficient.In spite of the fact that there are some studies which take Chinese materials as research samples,there is a lack of criteria for the evaluation of some turn characteristics in the research methods,making it hard for the conclusions drawn in these studies to get away from their subjectivity natures.To verify the applicability of Turn-taking Theory on the analysis of Chinese literature works,this study,based on the traditional frameworks of Turn-taking Theory,proposes evaluation terms,namely percentage of initiative turns,percentage of topic control,percentage of words and percentage of turns,to make sure that the turn control of conversational participants is evaluated in a more standardized way.Moreover,this study has also proposed some revision to the structure of the previous framework of turn-taking to make it more concise and reasonable,and what’s more,better fit for the present study.Frog is a novel by Yan Mo published in 2009 who employs homophonic techniques in the novel to denote baby and Nv Wa with frog.Most studies on the novel focus on the symbolism and imagism of the novel,while research on the characteristic conversations and various personalities is far from being sufficient.Therefore,this study intends to analyze the five conversations participated by Chen Bi in the novel under the revised framework of turn-taking so as to reveal the relationship between personality and turn characteristics.On that basis,the percentage of initiative turns,percentage of topic control,turn-length and percentage of turns of Chen Bi in the five conversations are chosen to be compared from a diachronic perspective,so that the relationship between turn variations and personality changes is made evident.The significance of this study lies not only in the revision to the previous framework of turn-taking,but also to extend the applicability of Turn-taking Theory to the analysis of Chinese literature works.Moreover,this study provides a new analytical method for the characterization of character personalities and contributes to research and studies on Frog in conversation analysis.