Click-Initiated Self-Repair in Changing the Sequential Trajectory of Actions-in-Progress

ABSTRACT

Clicks are velarically initiated ingressive stops. This study investigates the interactional uses of clicks in approximately 12 hours of Mandarin face-to-face conversations. It focuses on the TCU-medial clicks that occur in a type of action repair: a syntactically incomplete TCU followed by a click and the start of a new TCU. The click-initiated action repair changes the projected trajectories of actions-in-progress. It seems to be used to deal with two types of problems: the social and interactional inappositeness and sensitivity of the speaker’s ongoing action shown through coparticipants’ visually displayed orientations, and the speaker’s own change of state. This study adds to our knowledge about the types of practices that may be used to accomplish repair and the types of problems that the action repair may be mobilized to deal with. Data are in Mandarin Chinese with English translation.

Notes

¹ To my knowledge, there is no study of the uses of imperatives in naturally occurring Mandarin talk-in-interaction. However, earlier research on imperatives and Chinese politeness argues that imperatives are a “preferred” way of making requests in Chinese (Lee-Wong, 1994b), and the directness conveyed by imperatives in Chinese runs counter to what is reported in Western politeness (Gao, 1999; Lee-Wong, 1994a; Skewis, 2003).

² The utterance-final particle bei is argued to have two main functions: (a) indicating an assertion or proposed action as the only self-evident possibility, and (b) conveying that the speaker is not concerned about whether the recipient commits oneself to the proposed action (Xu, 2007, p. 73). Based on these two functions, Xu (2007, p. 78) further argues that bei is used to index a relatively close social relationship between the speaker and the recipient.

³ In Mandarin grammar, time and locative adjuncts and modifiers of the main verb precede the verb. Thus, the main verb is the unproduced terminal item in the syntactic structure in line 5, which is eventually produced in line 10, renshi (“meet/know”). However, the telling environment and the syntax-so-far in line 5 make the terminal verb highly projectable. The highly projectable but not-yet-produced verb is provided in the free English translation for the understanding of the English-speaking readers.