24.2647, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Chinese, Mandarin: Pan & K=?UTF-8?Q?=C3=A1d=C3=A1r_?=(2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-24-2647. Mon Jul 01 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.2647, Review: Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics; Chinese, Mandarin: Pan & Kádár (2013)

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Monica Macaulay, U of Wisconsin Madison
Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
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Mateja Schuck, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
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Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2013 00:44:46
From: Patrick Callier [prc23 at georgetown.edu]
Subject: Chinese Discourse and Interaction

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-531.html

EDITOR: Yuling  Pan
EDITOR: Dániel Zoltan Kádár
TITLE: Chinese Discourse and Interaction
SUBTITLE: Theory and Practice
PUBLISHER: Equinox Publishing Ltd
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Patrick R Callier, Georgetown University

SUMMARY

This book brings together a range of views on discourse and interaction in
spoken and written Chinese. The intent is to update scholarly understanding of
discourse in the Chinese language with new analysis of empirical data, which
can in turn provide an additional layer of nuance to discourses around
indirectness, hierarchical orientation, or the emphasis on “connection”
(guanxi) in Chinese interaction. These are all concepts which have found a lot
of traction not just in linguistics and discourse analysis, but also in
communication studies in general and business communication in particular. As
many of the studies in this volume find, these and other widely used concepts
(e.g. “face”) often have analytical utility, but the details of their
implementation in interaction problematize the overly general and sometimes
essentialist character of characterizations of Chinese language and culture
that circulate within and outside of China. As such, the volume is of broad
interest to scholars of Chinese language, discourse and culture, as well as
linguists, communications scholars, and teachers of Chinese as a foreign
language, among others.

Yuling Pan and Dániel Kádár’s introduction sets the stage for the volume,
justifying the multiplicity of approaches represented in the contributions by
citing the volume’s aim to avoid essentializing accounts of a monolithic
Chinese culture, as well as to strike a balance between detailed linguistic
and microsocial analysis and larger-scale interactional and macrosocial
description.

Part I, “Conversation Analytic and Linguistic Approaches to Chinese
Discourse,” encompasses Chapters 2-5, and consists of sequential analysis of
talk-in-interaction from spoken Chinese (mostly Mandarin, with one paper also
incorporating data from Cantonese), with all adopting analytic approaches
influenced by conversation analysis (CA), along with other methodological
influences.

Tomoko Endo’s chapter, “Epistemic stance in Mandarin conversation: The
positions and functions of wo juede (I feel/think),” outlines the functions of
the phrase ‘wo juede’ in mitigating possible disagreement, managing
turn-taking, and modulating commitment to a proposition. In parallel to
interactional analyses of English ‘I think’ (Kärkkäinen 2006), Tono shows that
the functions of ‘wo juede’ in discourse are multiple and highly
context-dependent, for instance to mitigate disagreement, solicit agreement,
or manage the floor.

“Self-repair in Mandarin and Cantonese: Delaying the next item due in casual
conversation and news interviews” is Wei Zhang and Angela Chan’s chapter
(Chapter 3). They conduct sequential and quantitative analyses of repair
strategies in proximity to two similar particles: Mandarin ‘de’ and Cantonese
‘ge,’ which “link” a modifying phrase to its head noun. The authors draw on
data from two kinds of interactional situations — less formal conversational
settings and more formal televised news interviews — for each language
variety. They uncover interesting differences in the use of “recycling” (or
repetition) as a self-repair strategy between Mandarin and Cantonese, as well
as distinctions in the overall frequency of self-repair between. They
emphasize the interaction of phonology, syntax, and interactional
considerations in explaining the patterns in their data.

Chapter 4, Agnes Weiyun He’s “‘Do I really have to?’ The give-and-take of
deontic meaning in Chinese,” looks at interactionally negotiated modality in
data from a Chinese-language classroom. In a series of examples, He shows how
proposed deontic framings of a situation (that an action in some context is
obligatory, suggested, or merely permissible, for instance) are negotiated
across turns and between interactants. These negotiated meanings, moreover,
feed into not just language acquisition, but also the socialization of
children into “traditional” Chinese values and practices.

Chapter 5, the last in Part I, is Cher Leng Lee’s “English ‘then’ in
colloquial Singapore Mandarin.” This chapter presents fascinating data from
Singapore, in which speakers mix the English discourse marker ‘then’ into
their spoken Mandarin. ‘Then’ serves several functions, including indicating
temporal or causal sequence, securing the floor, requesting information, and
conceding information, allegedly going well beyond the known functions of this
discourse marker in English.

The second part of the collection, consisting of Chapters 6-14, is “Discourse
analytic and social approaches to Chinese discourse.” The first offering is
Yueguo Gu’s “Power in situated discourse.” This chapter draws on Gu’s
participant observation at an event that attracted participation from
political, academic and press actors, and the author describes models of the
structure of the event and its participants, including their capacities and
goals. These models are apparently implemented in an explicit format called
Unified Modeling Language (UML), though this implementation is not fully
described or tested in this contribution. Gu focuses on the place of power in
the proceedings he observed, and advocates a view of power as relations of
“mutual dependency” between individual actors.

Continuing Part II’s examination of discourse-mediated social processes,
Wei-Lin Melody Chang and Michael Haugh’s highly interesting chapter, “‘Face’
in Taiwanese business interactions: From emic concepts to emic practices,”
reports findings from an investigation of the idea of ‘face’ from two angles.
Using data from ethnographic interviews, the authors reconstruct the ‘emic
concept’ of face as formulated by participants in the Taiwanese business
world. Supplementing this with data from business encounters, they show that
the way interactants actually negotiate and respond to face concerns in
interaction is not necessarily described by the explicit conceptualizing
elicited in interviews.

Chapters 8 and 9 look at data from the participation of Chinese speakers in
U.S. Census Bureau surveys. The former, Yuling Pan’s “What are Chinese
respondents responding to? A close examination of question-answer sequences in
survey interviews,” is a mostly qualitative examination of how Chinese
speakers responded to questions during an in-depth face-to-face survey by
census workers. It shows how participants’ responses, which were sometimes
“indirect” or “off-topic,” were influenced by a variety of cultural and
contextual factors, and brings welcome nuance to descriptions of Chinese
interaction as characteristically indirect, delving into the whys and
wherefores of such indirectness. Bringing Pan’s insights to a broader
examination of Census Bureau practice and survey response behavior, Anna
Yukyee Chan’s “Discourse analysis of Chinese speakers’ indirect and
contrary-to-face-value responses to survey interview questions” is a mostly
quantitative comparison of Chinese-speaking and English-speaking respondents
to a U.S. Census survey. Chan finds that Chinese speakers provided more
indirect responses, as well as responses judged by researchers as being
contrary to the respondent’s actual intent. These patterns of response were
unevenly distributed according to educational attainment and dialect
background, highlighting internal diversity among Chinese speakers with regard
to indirectness and other discursive behaviors.

Hao Sun’s “Customer-employee interaction from a diachronic perspective”
compares recordings of customer service interactions on the telephone made in
the mid-90s and 2009. Sun notes that the later interactions are markedly
different in their closings, and feature more involvement overall on the part
of the employee than the earlier recordings. Overall, this reflects
large-scale changes in the service economy in mainland China and the uptake of
consumer-oriented service practices.

“Chinese prenatal genetic counseling discourse in Hong Kong: Healthcare
providers’ (non)directive stance, or who is making the decision?,” by Olga
Zayts, Virginia Wake Yelei, and Stephanie Schnurr, looks at interactions
between healthcare providers providing genetic counseling to expectant mothers
in Hong Kong, and demonstrates how healthcare providers appear to be more
“directive” in their interactions with patients than we would expect, given
the emphasis on nondirective counseling in (Western) discourses of genetic
counseling. Notably, directive stances and behaviors are clearly
co-constructed, indicating that the apparently directive orientation of the
counseling is based not on one-sided domineering or negligence on the part of
the healthcare providers, but on shared expectations for directive behavior in
situations involving status difference.

Winnie Cheng’s “The pragmatics of Q&A interactions: Public discourses in Hong
Kong” returns to question-answer sequences to ask: What are the functions of
questions and answers? Her data come from recordings of press conferences held
by various Hong Kong government actors, and the questions, coming from members
of the press, serve a variety of functions including elicitation of facts or
opinions, criticizing the addressee, or providing commentary. Answers
variously “comply” -- that is, answer the question with the expected format
and information -- or fail to do so in one of several ways.

Dániel Z. Kádár turns our attention to written discourse in Chapter 13, “On
the positive formation of Chinese group identity,” which is an exploration of
a fascinating epistolary corpus from 18th-century China. The letter-writer
(sadly the letters of his interlocutors are not analyzed, perhaps because they
are not available), a member of the literate civil servant class in Beijing,
hails originally from Shaoxing in southern China. Addressing other
Beijing-based literati from his home region, he commonly laments the working
conditions in Beijing, emphasizes his and his addressee’s shared connections
to their home region, and thematizes the craft of letter-writing itself. Kádár
analyzes these practices as partially formative of a Shaoxing “Community of
Practice,” in Wenger’s (1998) sense, and goes on to analyze the Shaoxing
community’s innovative use of highbrow “mock impoliteness.”

The final research chapter is another examination of written discourse:
“‘Polysemous’ politeness: Speaker self-referring forms in Honglou Meng,” by
Xinren Chen. Honglou Meng (‘A Dream of Red Mansions’) is the masterwork of
vernacular Chinese novels before the modern era, and, as the editors point out
in the introduction, the book is the subject of a sizable subfield of literary
analysis in China known as Hongxue (‘Red studies’). This chapter investigates
various strategies for speaker self-reference in dialogue in Honglou Meng
including pronouns, kinship terms, and self-lowering and modest referring
phrases. Speakers mostly use pronouns, but the smattering of other
self-referential strategies is shown to have various pragmatic effects in
context, especially for managing the relationship between speaker and
addressee.

Rounding out the volume, Kenneth Kong’s epilogue identifies the different
analytic strategies and theoretical approaches employed by the contributors,
and makes valuable suggestions for future directions of research. I will
address a couple of his points in my evaluation below.

EVALUATION

This volume sets out to bring together diverse perspectives in order “to
describe Chinese discourse and interaction in a wider sense” and “in a
comprehensive way” (3). Certainly, the works represented here study phenomena
spanning a range of interactional and linguistic scales, from Zhang and Chan’s
analysis of repair on a single grammatical particle, to Chang and Haugh’s
elucidation of interactional practices related to ‘face,’ all the way up to
the establishment of community in Kádár’s analysis of 18th-century letter
writing. The value of empirically grounded analyses of interaction in
improving and complicating our picture of “Chinese communication” cannot be
underestimated. The book’s diversity of approaches, as the editors point out,
is valuable not just in the abstract, for providing multiple points of view,
but also for helping destabilize Chinese culture as a single, monolithic
object of study, which allows us to appreciate its variability in time, space,
and along a number of social dimensions. And the fact that such a volume is
appearing in English, in the “West,” bodes extremely well for the future of
the study of Chinese discourse in the English-speaking world.

While there are occasionally distracting inconsistencies between contributions
in terms of style and adherence to mechanics and convention, Pan and Kádár’s
volume contains a wealth of detailed attention to the empirical details of
interaction. Pragmatic multifunctionality and the capacity of linguistic forms
to manage social relations are, unsurprisingly, foregrounded in a large
majority of the pieces. Additional themes that emerge are the distinction
between ‘normative’ and ‘strategic’ politeness (in Chang and Haugh’s and
Chen’s pieces, in particular), and inter-speaker variability, especially
between speakers of different dialects (illustrated most clearly by Zhang and
Chan on repair and Chan on survey responses). The intersubjective negotiation
of power and status is another prominent theme, addressed by He, Gu, Pan,
Zayts et al., and Chen, among others.

The volume’s breadth of subject matter is matched by the theoretical
multiplicity that emerges from the volume as a whole, satisfying the stated
aims of the editors. Individual pieces occasionally leave the reader wanting
more data, deeper analysis or more conclusive theorization, but as one of the
first edited volumes in the area of Chinese discourse, it is perhaps best to
conceive of this volume as opening doors rather than making final statements.
I agree with Kong when he advises that future research on discourse in Chinese
would do well to locate itself more actively in approaches (Kong suggests
Scollon’s (2001) Mediated Discourse Analysis) that link individual texts and
discrete moments of interaction to the larger social processes with which they
stand in dialectic relation. Especially since so many of the pieces in the
present volume address discourse in “institutional” contexts (e.g. the
classroom, mass-mediated political communication, genetic counseling,
capitalist enterprise, state-sponsored demography, etc.), it is important to
begin explicitly tracing such “micro-macro” dialectics where they can be
found. He’s piece on classroom interaction, Pan’s and Chan’s work on U.S.
Census Bureau surveys, and Cheng’s contribution on politician-reporter
interactions, among others, make important gestures in this direction, not
just in theorizing these links, but also in making real-world adjustments to
institutional practice (for instance, at the Census Bureau).

‘Chinese Discourse and Interaction: Theory and Practice’ is a delight to read
and a welcome challenge for any scholar of discourse in Chinese contexts, as
well as for researchers in cross-cultural politeness and pragmatics, and
students of Chinese communication, more broadly. The volume skews “micro,”
though it addresses a dizzying array of interactional situations, and many
linguists and discourse analysts will appreciate the contributors’ attention
to the nuances of function and meaning in context. I hope, evidently along
with the editors, that this volume heralds even more efforts toward collating
and synthesizing the findings on the empirical study of Chinese discourse and
interaction, thus permitting us to arrive at a more valid critical
understanding of what makes interaction in Chinese “distinctive” and worthy of
broader theoretical attention.

REFERENCES

Kärkkäinen, Elise. 2006. “Stance Taking in Conversation: From Subjectivity to
Intersubjectivity.” Text & Talk 26 (6): 699-731.

Scollon, Ron. 2001. Mediated Discourse: The Nexus of Practice. New York:
Routledge.

Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and
Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Patrick Callier is a 5th-year Ph.D. student in Linguistics at Georgetown
University. His primary research interests lie in sociophonetics, stylistic
variation and social meaning. His dissertation research is on the linguistic
distribution and stylistic meaning potentials of creaky voice in Mandarin
Chinese, and he conducted sociolinguistic fieldwork in Beijing, China in the
2010-2011 academic year as well as summer 2012. He is also interested in
mass-mediated discourse—especially TV dramas and Twitter—in addition to gender
and social class.








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