Some interactional uses of syntactically incomplete turns in Mandarin conversation

Abstract

In everyday conversation, sometimes a speaker may not complete his/her turn, and the recipients do not treat it as problematic. This paper investigates this type of syntactically incomplete turns (henceforth, SITs) in Mandarin conversation. Specifically, this study examines how SITs are used and constructed through multimodal resources in Mandarin face-to-face conversation. Adopting the methodology of conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, and multimodal analysis, the present study examines 8 hours of everyday Mandarin face-to-face conversation. It shows that the SITs are situated in particular sequential environments and triggered by local contingencies. For example, they are used to accomplish socially and interactionally inappropriate actions and display sensitivity to the recipients’ disengagement from the ongoing talk and the current participation framework. Also, despite the syntactic incompleteness of the SITs, the prosodic and bodily-visual features involved in their production usually indicate possible turn completion.