“There is more here than meets the eye!”: the use of final ou in two sequential positions in Mandarin Chinese conversation

Abstract

An increasing number of studies of language and social interaction have begun to explore the phenomenon that parties to talk-in-interaction do not always speak their minds in a straightforward manner. Rather, for various interactional reasons, they may just allude to the action they intend to accomplish, in and through various linguistic or non-linguistic resources. By drawing on methodological practices from conversation analysis, this paper examines one of these resources in Mandarin Chinese: the final particle ou. It is shown that final ou and its attached utterance regularly occur in two kinds of sequential positions in spontaneous Mandarin conversation: (i) in first position where informing, reporting or story-telling is underway; and (ii) in responsive position where some implicit yet potentially negatively-valenced interactional work is being done. It is argued that despite these two seemingly distinct positions, the central usage of final ou is for the speaker to highlight the salience and newsworthiness of a focal event — commonly by alerting the recipient to the implication that “there is more here than meets the eye!”