Grammar in Interaction: The Syntax and Prosody of Turn Continuation in Chinese Conversation

Everyday mundane conversation is regarded as the primordial site for language use. Previous studies have identified recurrent regularities which underlie the smooth coordination of turn transitions between conversational participants, and some of the ways that a current turn may continue from a point where it could be heard as possibly complete. For instance, the speaker may add another sentence, e.g. “She eats them all the time. I understand they’re fattening, huh?” Or, the speaker may add further talk which fits to the end of the just completed utterance, effecting a continuation of that utterance, e.g. “How are you feeling? these days?” where “how are you feeling” is called the host and “these days” the increment. It is this latter way of turn continuation that has attracted much attention. The questions asked include (1) Is increment a new utterance or an extension from the previous one? (2) Is syntactic continuity the only criterion or are there other types of “increment” which show different syntactic relationship with the host? (3) What is the role of various prosodic features, e.g. intonation, stress, tempo, etc. and how do they interact with syntax in signaling various ways of continuing from a previous utterance? Preliminary cross-linguistic comparisons show that language-specific syntax is deeply intertwined with the practice of turn continuation in conversation. While rightward expansion comes more natural for languages with left-headedness syntax, e.g. English, languages with strong sentence brace or rich utterance-final elements (e.g. German, Japanese, Chinese) may develop other means for the same interactional end. Previous studies on Chinese has identified ‘right dislocation’ as a major device to extend an utterance beyond its apparently completion point, e.g. 但是影響不好啊在社會上。(But it has a bad influence in society). The aim of this project is to provide a comprehensive account of turn continuation in Chinese, including the types and distribution of those types, and to conduct a detailed syntactic and prosodic analysis on the types identified. It is hoped that by a comprehensive account of turn continuation in Chinese contributions can be made to cross-linguistic comparisons and to a better understanding of the interrelation of grammar and social interaction.