Projection in Mandarin Chinese conversation: Grammar and social interaction in question-answer sequences.

摘要

Question-answer sequences are an interactional activity made possible by the ability of conversational participants to project the trajectory of utterances. I identify interactional and grammatical features of talk that enable projection by examining interrogative utterances and their responses in video recorded conversations among Mandarin speakers. I begin by examining the situational contexts in which question-answer sequences sometimes occur, showing that large sequences make use of these adjacency pairs in specific ways. Participants can anticipate that questions will be asked because of the organization of these sequences. Next, I look at the organizational features of the turn in which an interrogative is uttered. Questions are often preceded by declarative statements or topics that introduce the interrogative, or contain elements such as the second person pronoun or negation that can identify the utterance as a question before the interrogative markers appear. Also, interrogatives typically occur last in an utterance, a position that readily projects a response as the next utterance. I also scrutinize the relationship between interrogatives and their responses to determine if the form of a question in any way projects the format of its response. Polarity interrogatives grammatically constrain the format of the response based in part on the form of the interrogative. Q-word interrogatives display a wider variety of responses, but participants have resources to demonstrate whether or not they are producing a response that conforms to the grammatical constraints of the interrogative and accepts the presuppositions of the interrogative. In conclusion I attempt to situate this work in a larger context and propose some avenues for future research.