26.2525, Review: Discourse; Phonology; Pragmatics; Syntax: Li (2014)

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Subject: 26.2525, Review: Discourse; Phonology; Pragmatics; Syntax: Li (2014)

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Date: Mon, 18 May 2015 15:59:26
From: Qiong Li [qiongli1014 at gmail.com; qiongl at andrew.cmu.edu]
Subject: Multimodality, Interaction and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-3207.html

AUTHOR: Xiaoting  Li
TITLE: Multimodality, Interaction and Turn-taking in Mandarin Conversation
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse 3
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Qiong Li, Carnegie Mellon University

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The book, based on the theory and methodology of conversation analysis (CA)
and interactional linguistics, presents an exploratory study on the role of
multimodal resources, i.e. syntax, prosody, body movements and pragmatic
resources, and their interaction in organization of turns in naturally
occurring Mandarin face-to-face conversation. It includes seven chapters, with
a focus on the introduction in Chapter 1, methodology in Chapter 2, syntax in
Chapter 3, prosody in Chapter 4, body movements in Chapter 5, the interplay of
the three resources with pragmatic resources in Chapter 6, and the conclusion
in Chapter 7.

Chapter 1 is an introduction to the basic concepts related to turn
organization (e.g., turn, turn-constructional unit, turn project) through
presenting examples in Mandarin conversation. The multimodal resources
including syntax, prosody and body movements are introduced. Despite the
achievements made by previous studies on Mandarin Chinese, neither the
specific ways in which syntactic constructions are deployed in
turn-constructional units (TCUs) and turns, nor naturally occurring Mandarin
conversation has been fully explored. To fill in these gaps, this book
attempts to illuminate the complex interaction of multiple resources with
pragmatic resources in face-to-face Mandarin turn organization.

Chapter 2 presents the methodological issues involved in the study, including
data collection, data transcription and methodological approaches. Fifteen
naturally occurring conversations were recorded via audio and video among 23
participants (14 females and 9 males) who are either friends or family
members. Verbal data were transcribed on the basis of GAT2
(Gesprachsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2) due to its advantage of
consistency in capturing the sound features of the data. The transcription
symbols developed by C. Goodwin (1981), Heath (1984, 1986), and Kendon (2004)
were adopted in the study to transcribe visual body movements. Each intonation
unit, pauses and visual behaviors were transcribed as an individual line. CA
was adopted in data analysis in order to discover the patterns, structures and
practices in the organization of talk-in-interaction through detailed
transcription. The author took the perspective of interactional linguistics to
reveal the reflexive relationship between language structure and interaction.

Chapter 3 provides an account of the features of particular Mandarin
lexico-syntactic structures and their interactional relevance to turn
organization and completion in Mandarin conversation. Two types of syntactic
structure (i.e., topic-comment and copula-complement structures) and three
types of syntactic features (i.e., word order, utterance-final particles, and
certain lexico-syntactic constructions) are discussed on the basis of the
collected data. In turn organization, topic-comment functions as a whole
structure when signalling recipients to take their turns after the comment,
while copula-complement furnishes speakers with a device to collaboratively
construct the next turn at the juncture between the copula and the complement.
In turn completion, both SOV and SVO word orders are introduced, but they
serve as predictors of a possible turn completion point  in different ways.
The SVO ordering allows an early projection while the SOV structure defers the
projection. In Mandarin conversation, the data also uncovers that
utterance-final particles and certain lexico-syntactic constructions
(e.g.,NP+VP+de+shi+NP) are frequently used to indicate possible turn
completion.

Chapter 4 involves two sections investigating the prosody in naturally
occurring face-to-face Mandarin conversation from an interactional approach.
The first section introduces the intonation unit and its role in turn
construction in Mandarin conversation. Coherent intonation contours including
global declining, rising and level intonation are demonstrated to be
predictors of turn construction in Mandarin conversation. Moreover, no
systematic one-to-one correspondence between intonation units and TCUs
(including single-TCU and multi-TCU turns) is observed because alignment and
non-alignment coexist across various sequential contexts regarding the
relationship between intonation units and TCUs. The second section examined
one type of prosodic/phonetic feature, the possible last accent, in the
projection and recognition of possible turn completion. The possible last
accent is the accent near the end of a TCU which can be characterized by a
prominently higher or lower pitch register, a noticeably broader pitch range,
a longer duration or higher volume. The collected data show that the feature
is relevant to possible turn completion in Mandarin conversation. On the other
hand, there is no turn transition after the possible last accent if the action
trajectory, turn management or contingency in interaction occurs. 

Chapter 5 sets out to focus on visual resources in turn organization: body
movements. Two types of body movements, gestures and postural shifts, and
their interactional functions are discussed in this chapter. First, it
presents the role of gesture units in turn construction of single-TCU and
multi-TCU turns. There is one-to-one correspondence between hand gesture and
the single-TCU turns if any gesture is involved in Mandarin conversation,
whereas, the gesture units are more complex in multi-TCU turns, usually
consisting of more than one gesture. Moreover, gestures, i.e. hand movements,
may also be deployed as visible and recognizable signals for turn completion.
In the data, the return of gesture and a certain type of hand movement, i.e.
self-groom, are observed at turn endings, and evidence is provided to show
that conversational participants orient to gesture as a cue for the possible
completion of a turn. As for the postural shifts, the findings reveal several
functions of postural shift, such as a visual display of the speaker’s
preference for the extended turns and sequences as units in interaction, a
resource to indicate the type of speaker’s engagement in the interaction and
the possible completion, as well as the function of framing the activity
implemented in the larger interaction units. The study, therefore, relates
both body movements and posture to turn organization in Mandarin conversation.

Based on the finding that pragmatic resources, i.e. social actions, are a
relevant factor involved in all interaction in the data, Chapter 6 explores
the interplay of syntax, prosody, and body movements with pragmatic resources
in turn organization in Mandarin conversation by analyzing the convergence and
divergence of these multiple resources, and examining how the interaction
displays in indicating the possible turn completion. Three examples are
presented in illustrating the ways in which these resources interact with each
other and work conjointly in projecting the same point of possible turn
transition and completion. In terms of the divergence of resources, the
analysis shows how multiple resources function in different ways and how
certain resources override others to contextualize the possible turn
completion in Mandarin conversation. The data indicates that divergent
resources are organized based on their interactional salience in turn
organization, and are produced equivocally in projecting possible turn
completion.

Chapter 7 is a summary of the preceding four chapters which investigate the
relevance to turn organization of syntactic features, prosody, and body
movements, and their interaction with pragmatic resources. Additionally, the
author points out the contribution of this book, as well as some implications
for future studies in three areas: Conversation Analysis (CA), interactional
linguistics and Chinese linguistics. The extension of this study can be
implemented through various focuses, such as other more complex cases of turn
transition, functions of these resources in institutional settings, the
relationship between turn design and action formation, a cross-linguistic
comparison of linguistic and visual cues in turn organization, etc.

EVALUATION

In sum, the book endeavors not only to explore the interactional function of
syntax, prosody and body movements, but also to illuminate their complex
interaction with pragmatic resources in face-to-face Mandarin turn
organization. As the author points out, it might be difficult to generalize
the findings of this study to all the situations where Mandarin conversation
occurs because the study is based on the data the author collected. However,
it provides readers with a window to understand natural Mandarin conversation
from a holistic perspective, and with directions for future studies as well.
On the other hand, much more effort is needed in illustrating Mandarin
conversation since it is a complex language with many special structures, such
as formulaic expressions, “ba” structures, etc. The issue of how these
constructs interact with prosody, body movements and pragmatic resources is
under-explored.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

My primary research interest is interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). I’m interested
in pragmatic constructs ranging from speech acts to conversational
implicatures, sentence final particles, address forms. Besides the production
of pragmatic functions, I am also interested in the development of L2
learners’ perception of various pragmatic targets and what factors may
influence this process.





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