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Stance in Talk: A Conversation Analysis of Mandarin Final Particles
Journal of Pragmatics 39 (2007) 428–430 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Stance in Talk: A Conversation Analysis of Mandarin Final Particles Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004, XVI + 258 pp., $119.00 While some research methodologies have come and gone, the perspective known as conversation analysis (CA) has prospered and expanded significantly in terms of its range of application. Originally developed in the 1960s by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson as a means for examining the social organization of mundane conversation, subsequent research has branched out to examine talk in institutional settings (e.g. Drew and Heritage, 1992) and has also considered sociological concepts such as gender (e.g. Kitzinger and Frith, 1999; Stokoe and Smithson, 2001), power (e.g. Hutchby, 1996), face (e.g. Lerner, 1996), and identity (e.g. Antaki and Widdicombe, 1998), among others. Moreover, despite occasional criticism of a bias toward English language data (Duranti, 1988; Haviland, 1997), CA research is now regularly conducted on a wide range of European and Asian languages. The recent book by Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu further demonstrates the wide application of CA as it uses data from Mandarin to approach the notion of stance from an interactional perspective. Wu does not go into an in-depth discussion of the variety of uses of the term ‘stance’ in the literature (Kockelman, 2004), but it is clear that she is building on stance as it has been employed in work by Biber and Finegan (1988, 1989) to make connections between linguistic markers and the attitudes and psychological attitudes of language users. While CA practitioners avoid, as a methodological rule of thumb, statements about the psychological or mental states of participants, Wu makes it clear that her interest is not in linking language with psychology. Instead, CA can be used to approach stance, in Wu’s words, ‘‘as an emergent product which is shaped by, and itself shapes, the unfolding development of interaction’’ (p. 3). Irregardless of what occurs inside a participant’s head, a stance, in simple terms, is something often made visible at the level of interaction. For those readers who may have trouble envisioning the application of CA to the notion of stance, Wu’s two introductory chapters, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Preliminaries and Methodology, will be of particular interest. In her review of previous literature in the ‘Introduction’, she notes that the CA idea of ‘turn design’ is in fact closely related to stance. It is in the design of turns that participants reveal their own understanding and sense of the unfolding interaction, including their take on or stance towards the content of the talk and/or their co-participants. She then goes on to discuss four interrelated aspects of turn design, lexical choice, syntactic design, prosodic manifestation, and sequential positioning, through which participants manage stances in interaction. This discussion of the previous literature, couched in a more general discussion of CA as well as some background on Mandarin and Chinese linguistics, prepares readers well for the analysis to follow. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2006.01.004
Book review
429
The analysis is presented in two rather lengthy chapters, Chapters 3 and 4, both of which are devoted to Mandarin final particles. In particular, Wu chooses to focus on the two particles a and ou as they occur in the final position of a turn constructional unit (TCU). This is done not because a and ou deserve more attention than other Mandarin final particles but rather because they were among the most frequent in Wu’s database. The corpus consists of seven telephone conversations and four video-taped multi-party, face-to-face conversations, all of which took place among people already acquainted. Wu is careful to emphasize that the decision to concentrate on a and ou in TCU-final position represents just the ‘beginning’ of ongoing research. Chapter 3 focuses on ou and begins by situating the analysis within previous descriptions of the particle in research on Mandarin. Wu notes that final ou has been primarily described as either a warning reminder or an exclamation, but she goes well beyond prior work by using the CA perspective to note that participants themselves seem to orient to a variety of uses of ou. Based on her corpus of spoken data, Wu draws a distinction between what she calls unmarked and marked ou. Unmarked ou is employed mainly in responsive utterances either to clarify what was just said or to indicate that the prior talk contains previously unknown information. Marked ou is used to ‘‘emphasize the extraordinary character of a state of affairs’’ (p. 85). Both forms of ou, despite serving different functions, enable participants to embody a stance toward the content of the talk. The analysis of ou in Chapter 3 is sometimes subtle and very detailed, but by paying attention to the orientations of the participants to ou-marked utterances, Wu not only treats readers to a deeper understanding of the usages of particle ou but also allows more generally for an appreciation of some of the interactional nuances involved in organizing talk in Mandarin. Much the same can be said for the analysis of final a in Chapter 4. Wu divides the analysis into two articulations of a, one with a notably low pitch and one with a flat or slightly higher pitch. The a with a notably low pitch is used commonly in grammatically constructed questions, often indicating some kind of trouble or problem in the asking of the question. Final a with a flat or slightly high pitch, in contrast, most commonly figures in non-interrogatives, marking a number of different stances, for example, that the speaker should have known the information just supplied or that the speaker does not fully agree with the information. Based on the in-depth analyses in the third and fourth chapters, this book marks a tremendous contribution, especially in three overlapping respects. First, it extends our application of the CA methodology to a concept, namely stance that has rarely been explicitly dealt with from a CA perspective. Second, it enhances our general ability to appreciate the breadth of the notion of stance by bringing it squarely into the realm of interaction. Finally, it greatly expands our understanding of the inner workings of casual conversation in Mandarin. As Wu notes in her conclusion, she has brought these three areas together in a work which ‘‘provides a window into how Mandarin speakers construct their epistemic and affective stances’’ (p. 239). Chapter 5 serves as the conclusion to the book, but it is worth noting that the implications of Wu’s analysis go beyond those mentioned in her rather short conclusion. The existence of final particles in Mandarin aligns it interestingly with two other East Asian Languages, Japanese and Korean, which also possess items referred to as final particles. Yet, unlike Japanese and Korean, noted to be similar in terms of grammatical features, Mandarin is different in some very basic ways. For example, Mandarin is commonly referred as an isolating language while Korean and Japanese have agglutinative characteristics. We might therefore wonder whether these basic typological differences would have any impact on the deployment of final particles across languages. Likewise, we could ask if final particles in Mandarin are implicated in turn construction and turn management in ways that differ from Japanese and Korean. To be sure, prior research from a CA perspective on Korean and Japanese is by no means abundant, but Wu’s
430
Book review
analysis does raise numerous questions and sets up fascinating possibilities for cross-linguistic research. Indeed, Wu readily points out in the conclusion that her study ‘‘is just the tip of the iceberg; it serves only as a starting point for more investigations’’ (p. 239). While her book stands as an outstanding accomplishment in its own right, it will be exciting to see how Wu employs the CA perspective in the future to build on her analysis and further contribute to our understanding of the complexities of Mandarin conversation. References Antaki, Charles, Widdicombe, Sue (Eds.), 1998. Identities in Talk. Sage, London. Biber, Douglas, Finegan, Edward, 1988. Adverbial stance types in English. Discourse Processes 11, 1–34. Biber, Douglas, Finegan, Edward, 1989. Styles of stance in English: lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text 9, 93–124. Duranti, Alessandro, 1988. Ethnography of speaking: Toward a linguistics of the praxis. In: Newmeyer, F. (Ed.), Language: The Socio-cultural Context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 210–228. Drew, Paul, Heritage, John (Eds.), 1992. Talk At Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Haviland, John, 1997. Shouts, shrieks, and shots: unruly political conversations in indigenous Chiapas. Pragmatics 7, 547–573. Hutchby, Ian, 1996. Power in discourse: the case of arguments on a British talk radio show. Discourse & Society 7, 481– 498. Kitzinger, Celia, Frith, Hannah, 1999. Just say no? The use of conversation analysis in developing a feminist perspective on sexual refusal. Discourse & Society 10, 293–316. Kockelman, Paul, 2004. Stance and subjectivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14, 127–150. Lerner, Gene, 1996. Finding ‘‘face’’ in the preference structures of talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly 59, 303–321. Stokoe, Elizabeth, Smithson, Janet, 2001. Making gender relevant: conversation analysis and gender categories in interaction. Discourse & Society 12, 217–244. Scott Saft teaches Linguistics, Japanese, and English as a Second Language at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. He has published work on discourse from both a conversation analytic and a critical discourse analytic perspective. His current research interests include talk in institutional settings and media discourse.
Scott Saft Languages and Linguistics, University of Hawai’i at Hilo, 200 Kawili Street, Hilo, HI 96720-4091, USA E-mail address: [email protected]
Book review Stance in Talk: A Conversation Analysis of Mandarin Final Particles Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004, XVI + 258 pp., $119.00 While some research methodologies have come and gone, the perspective known as conversation analysis (CA) has prospered and expanded significantly in terms of its range of application. Originally developed in the 1960s by Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson as a means for examining the social organization of mundane conversation, subsequent research has branched out to examine talk in institutional settings (e.g. Drew and Heritage, 1992) and has also considered sociological concepts such as gender (e.g. Kitzinger and Frith, 1999; Stokoe and Smithson, 2001), power (e.g. Hutchby, 1996), face (e.g. Lerner, 1996), and identity (e.g. Antaki and Widdicombe, 1998), among others. Moreover, despite occasional criticism of a bias toward English language data (Duranti, 1988; Haviland, 1997), CA research is now regularly conducted on a wide range of European and Asian languages. The recent book by Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu further demonstrates the wide application of CA as it uses data from Mandarin to approach the notion of stance from an interactional perspective. Wu does not go into an in-depth discussion of the variety of uses of the term ‘stance’ in the literature (Kockelman, 2004), but it is clear that she is building on stance as it has been employed in work by Biber and Finegan (1988, 1989) to make connections between linguistic markers and the attitudes and psychological attitudes of language users. While CA practitioners avoid, as a methodological rule of thumb, statements about the psychological or mental states of participants, Wu makes it clear that her interest is not in linking language with psychology. Instead, CA can be used to approach stance, in Wu’s words, ‘‘as an emergent product which is shaped by, and itself shapes, the unfolding development of interaction’’ (p. 3). Irregardless of what occurs inside a participant’s head, a stance, in simple terms, is something often made visible at the level of interaction. For those readers who may have trouble envisioning the application of CA to the notion of stance, Wu’s two introductory chapters, ‘Introduction’ and ‘Preliminaries and Methodology, will be of particular interest. In her review of previous literature in the ‘Introduction’, she notes that the CA idea of ‘turn design’ is in fact closely related to stance. It is in the design of turns that participants reveal their own understanding and sense of the unfolding interaction, including their take on or stance towards the content of the talk and/or their co-participants. She then goes on to discuss four interrelated aspects of turn design, lexical choice, syntactic design, prosodic manifestation, and sequential positioning, through which participants manage stances in interaction. This discussion of the previous literature, couched in a more general discussion of CA as well as some background on Mandarin and Chinese linguistics, prepares readers well for the analysis to follow. 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2006.01.004
Book review
429
The analysis is presented in two rather lengthy chapters, Chapters 3 and 4, both of which are devoted to Mandarin final particles. In particular, Wu chooses to focus on the two particles a and ou as they occur in the final position of a turn constructional unit (TCU). This is done not because a and ou deserve more attention than other Mandarin final particles but rather because they were among the most frequent in Wu’s database. The corpus consists of seven telephone conversations and four video-taped multi-party, face-to-face conversations, all of which took place among people already acquainted. Wu is careful to emphasize that the decision to concentrate on a and ou in TCU-final position represents just the ‘beginning’ of ongoing research. Chapter 3 focuses on ou and begins by situating the analysis within previous descriptions of the particle in research on Mandarin. Wu notes that final ou has been primarily described as either a warning reminder or an exclamation, but she goes well beyond prior work by using the CA perspective to note that participants themselves seem to orient to a variety of uses of ou. Based on her corpus of spoken data, Wu draws a distinction between what she calls unmarked and marked ou. Unmarked ou is employed mainly in responsive utterances either to clarify what was just said or to indicate that the prior talk contains previously unknown information. Marked ou is used to ‘‘emphasize the extraordinary character of a state of affairs’’ (p. 85). Both forms of ou, despite serving different functions, enable participants to embody a stance toward the content of the talk. The analysis of ou in Chapter 3 is sometimes subtle and very detailed, but by paying attention to the orientations of the participants to ou-marked utterances, Wu not only treats readers to a deeper understanding of the usages of particle ou but also allows more generally for an appreciation of some of the interactional nuances involved in organizing talk in Mandarin. Much the same can be said for the analysis of final a in Chapter 4. Wu divides the analysis into two articulations of a, one with a notably low pitch and one with a flat or slightly higher pitch. The a with a notably low pitch is used commonly in grammatically constructed questions, often indicating some kind of trouble or problem in the asking of the question. Final a with a flat or slightly high pitch, in contrast, most commonly figures in non-interrogatives, marking a number of different stances, for example, that the speaker should have known the information just supplied or that the speaker does not fully agree with the information. Based on the in-depth analyses in the third and fourth chapters, this book marks a tremendous contribution, especially in three overlapping respects. First, it extends our application of the CA methodology to a concept, namely stance that has rarely been explicitly dealt with from a CA perspective. Second, it enhances our general ability to appreciate the breadth of the notion of stance by bringing it squarely into the realm of interaction. Finally, it greatly expands our understanding of the inner workings of casual conversation in Mandarin. As Wu notes in her conclusion, she has brought these three areas together in a work which ‘‘provides a window into how Mandarin speakers construct their epistemic and affective stances’’ (p. 239). Chapter 5 serves as the conclusion to the book, but it is worth noting that the implications of Wu’s analysis go beyond those mentioned in her rather short conclusion. The existence of final particles in Mandarin aligns it interestingly with two other East Asian Languages, Japanese and Korean, which also possess items referred to as final particles. Yet, unlike Japanese and Korean, noted to be similar in terms of grammatical features, Mandarin is different in some very basic ways. For example, Mandarin is commonly referred as an isolating language while Korean and Japanese have agglutinative characteristics. We might therefore wonder whether these basic typological differences would have any impact on the deployment of final particles across languages. Likewise, we could ask if final particles in Mandarin are implicated in turn construction and turn management in ways that differ from Japanese and Korean. To be sure, prior research from a CA perspective on Korean and Japanese is by no means abundant, but Wu’s
430
Book review
analysis does raise numerous questions and sets up fascinating possibilities for cross-linguistic research. Indeed, Wu readily points out in the conclusion that her study ‘‘is just the tip of the iceberg; it serves only as a starting point for more investigations’’ (p. 239). While her book stands as an outstanding accomplishment in its own right, it will be exciting to see how Wu employs the CA perspective in the future to build on her analysis and further contribute to our understanding of the complexities of Mandarin conversation. References Antaki, Charles, Widdicombe, Sue (Eds.), 1998. Identities in Talk. Sage, London. Biber, Douglas, Finegan, Edward, 1988. Adverbial stance types in English. Discourse Processes 11, 1–34. Biber, Douglas, Finegan, Edward, 1989. Styles of stance in English: lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text 9, 93–124. Duranti, Alessandro, 1988. Ethnography of speaking: Toward a linguistics of the praxis. In: Newmeyer, F. (Ed.), Language: The Socio-cultural Context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 210–228. Drew, Paul, Heritage, John (Eds.), 1992. Talk At Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Haviland, John, 1997. Shouts, shrieks, and shots: unruly political conversations in indigenous Chiapas. Pragmatics 7, 547–573. Hutchby, Ian, 1996. Power in discourse: the case of arguments on a British talk radio show. Discourse & Society 7, 481– 498. Kitzinger, Celia, Frith, Hannah, 1999. Just say no? The use of conversation analysis in developing a feminist perspective on sexual refusal. Discourse & Society 10, 293–316. Kockelman, Paul, 2004. Stance and subjectivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14, 127–150. Lerner, Gene, 1996. Finding ‘‘face’’ in the preference structures of talk-in-interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly 59, 303–321. Stokoe, Elizabeth, Smithson, Janet, 2001. Making gender relevant: conversation analysis and gender categories in interaction. Discourse & Society 12, 217–244. Scott Saft teaches Linguistics, Japanese, and English as a Second Language at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo. He has published work on discourse from both a conversation analytic and a critical discourse analytic perspective. His current research interests include talk in institutional settings and media discourse.
Scott Saft Languages and Linguistics, University of Hawai’i at Hilo, 200 Kawili Street, Hilo, HI 96720-4091, USA E-mail address: [email protected]