A Pragmatic Study Of Repair In BELF Meetings

Business English as a Lingua Franca(henceforth,BELF)has been a hot topic because of widespread and frequent use of English in business settings.Researches concerned BELF cover definition,characteristics of BELF and discourse strategies employed in BELF settings.Given the features of business meetings,which require correctness and clarity,repair is a pretty common language phenomenon.However,it has not been paid enough attention to in BELF meetings.In business meetings,businessmen are both taskfocused and relation-oriented,which coincides with the framework of rapport management.This thesis aims to explore how repair is employed in BELF meetings to manage rapport under the influence of contextual variables.This thesis is based on rapport management theory(Spencer-Oatey,2008).The thesis first identifies and classifies repair,then sorts out frequency and distribution of repair in three BELF meetings,and analyzes interpersonal functions of repair from the perspective of rapport management.The thesis selects three professional business meetings,which are collected from Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English(VOICE),a structured collection of language data,the first computer-readable corpus capturing spoken English as a Lingua Franca(henceforth,ELF)interactions.In the thesis,qualitative method is employed to analyze contextual variables influencing repair and interpersonal functions of repair in BELF meetings from the perspective of rapport management.Quantitative method is used to figure out type,frequency,distribution of repair,and the relationship between repair and interpersonal functions in three business meetings.In the process of classifying and identifying repair,conversation analysis approach is adopted to examine initiation placement and initiator technique of repair.In BELF meetings,four types of repair are employed,self-initiated self-repair,selfinitiated other-repair,other-initiated self-repair and other-initiated other-repair,and frequency and distribution of repair are strikingly different.Other-initiated self-repair and self-initiated self-repair are used more frequently.In addition,self-initiated repairs and other-initiated repairs differentiate from each other in initiation placement and initiator technique,and each of them is regular in some way.Self-initiated repairs place their initiations in three main types of positions,within the same turn as their trouble source;in that turn's transition space;in third turn to the trouble-source turn.However,other-initiated repairs mainly occupy one position: the turn following the trouble source.Under the influence of five sets of factors of BELF meetings,participant relations,message content,social roles,activity type,and English proficiency,repair functions differently,managing rapport from three aspects,face needs,sociality rights,and interactional goals.This thesis explores repair employed in BELF meetings from the perspective of rapport management.It provides a new theoretical angle to study repair,and enriches researches into BELF meetings by exploring one more kind of language strategy.The thesis is expected to make a contribution to studies in BELF settings and provide implications for future researches into repair from the perspective of rapport management.