Yu-Wu2018

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Yu-Wu2018
BibType ARTICLE
Key Yu-Wu2018
Author(s) Guodong Yu, Yaxin Wu
Title Inviting in Mandarin: Anticipating the likelihood of the success of an invitation
Editor(s)
Tag(s) Congruence, EMCA, Grammar, Inviting, Success, Syntactic form
Publisher
Year 2018
Language English
City
Month
Journal Journal of Pragmatics
Volume 125
Number
Pages 130–148
URL Link
DOI 10.1016/j.pragma.2017.06.013
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

Inviting is a ubiquitous social action. Although the outcome of an invitation and whatever arrangements are made thereafter involve collaboration between the parties involved, nevertheless an invitation is made (usually) with the aim that the invitee will accept and hence that inviter and invitee(s) will get together to do something, i.e. for some sociability. In Mandarin, invitations are realized mainly through three syntactic forms or conversational practices, namely, interrogatives in the form of “Verb-not-Verb”, imperatives, and declaratives containing the lexical item “hai” (还) or “benlai (本来). The distributional pattern of these syntactic forms is systematically related to the inviter's anticipation of the likelihood of the success of an invitation (e.g. the ease or difficulty with which the invitee might have in accepting the invitation). There is a symmetry or congruence between on the one hand the inviter's choice of a specific syntactic form, and on the other the invitee's response. Inviting is executed not only through turn design but also through sequential management, either simply in an adjacency pair or in a rather extended sequence. The present study is informed by the methodology of conversation analysis and uses audio-recorded daily communications in Mandarin as data. The findings contribute to the existing conversation analysis studies on social actions and also to the study of Mandarin grammar.

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