Shifting practices and emerging patterns: Telephone service encounters in Shanghai

Abstract

AbstractThis study explores the dynamic nature of language in context, utilizing two sets of comparable Chinese discourse data of telephone service encounters collected in the same community a decade apart. It describes and characterizes current business practices and identifies shifts in discursive practices in light of the patterns observed in the past. Observed changes include constitutive components of the global structure, local realization of the structural elements, and interaction dynamics as a result of changed, redefined contexts and realigned footings. I propose that observed shifts may represent and constitute in part the emergence in the community of the reconstruction, or reshaping, of a more distinctive telephone service encounter (TSE) spoken genre and related discursive features. With the adoption of more recognizable boundary markers, shifts in discursive practice of telephone service encounters in Shanghai may result in openings with distinguishable features from calls made to residences. (Discourse analysis, service encounter, practice, telephone in business, China, spoken genre)*