Pragmatic Approach To Repair As A Turn-management Strategy In Chinese Casual Conversation

Repair as an important area for research in conversation analysis was first put forward bysociologist Schegloff etc. in1977. Ever since, it has appealed great attention by scholarsworldwide. In the past30years or so, the Chinese linguists have also achieved quite a lot inthis field. However, examining the achievements at home and abroad, the author has foundthat the researches in repair mainly focus on English as a foreign or second language. Thereare few achievements in Chinese as native language, and even less in Chinese casualconversation. The author has also noted that the previous studies are limited by themetafunction of repair without any attention to the special pragmatic function of repair. Thisthesis is to examine the special pragmatic function of repair as a turn-management strategy(abbreviated as TMR), which highlights in Chinese casual conversation.The mini-corpus studied in this thesis is constructed by the author herself. With theother’s permission, the author has recorded15hours’ recording including various context,such as dormitory, dining hall and parties etc. There are altogether300samples transcribed inthe corpus eventually. Meanwhile, all the data have been transcribed anonymously to avoidthe infringing of the privacy.Based on SJS’s theories about repair and Liu Senlin’s classification of turn-managementstrategies, this study presents a classification which puts the TMR into four groups: the repairto get the floor from the speaker, the repair to keep the floor, the repair to get one’s floor andthe repair to repair the silence. On this basis, the analysis of frequency comes to the followingconclusions.Firstly, the statistic analysis of the four categories of TMR shows that the repair of givingones floor takes the largest proportion, while the repair of repair the silence takes the least.Secondly, this study discusses the issue of preference for self-repair proposed by SJS andconcludes that there are lots of chances of self-repair on TMR organization, but it prefers toother-repair in the outcome. This is different from the SJS’s conclusion that preference forself-initiation and self-repair.In addition, the author conducts the study from the three moves respectively to discusshow a trouble source is caused, how repair is initiated as well as how repair is done. Through analyzing the trouble source of TMR in Chinese casual conversation in this study, the authorcomes to that the dominate trouble source in TMR is the difficulty in word searching, whichhas a high rate in the TMR to give the floor to the hearer. As for who initiates the repair, it isdecided by the motivation to manage the turn of the participants in the conversation, and theparticipant who is inclined to control the turn is more easy to initiate the repair, meanwhile,the initiative strategies are various for the different motivations. In terms of repair strategy,there is no visible preference in the choice of the repair strategies in each type of TMR for thedispersion of the repair strategies and the participants’ individual practice. In the end, thetrajectories of TMR are illustrated as a diagram to present how the repair as aturn-management strategy operates in Chinese casual conversation.