A CONVERSATION ANALYTIC APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF UTTERANCE PARTICLES IN CANTONESE submitted by KANG-KWONG LUKE for the degree of D.Phil. Department of Language and Linguistic Science University of York March 1988 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I : INTRODUCTION: UTTERANCE PARTICLES IN CANTONESE I I. Grammatical Descriptions of Particles I 2. Four Features of Utterance Particles 3 3. The Linguistic Interests of Utterance Particles 11 CHAPTER 2 : RESEARCH STRATEGIES 19 I. Everyday Conversational Data 20 1.1 Naturally Occurring Data vs. Constructed Data 20 1.2 'Raw' Data vs. Elicited Data 25 1.3 Everyday Conversation 28 1.3.1 Number of participants 28 1.3.2 Non-instrumental purposes 29 1.3.3 Course unscheduled 29 1.3.4 Continuing relationship of the participants 29 1.3.5 Co-presence 29 1.4 The Observer's Paradox 30 1.5 The Database of the Present Study 31 2. Ethnomethodology 32 2.1 The Reflexive Character of the Accountability of Social Actions 32 2.2 The Indexical Nature of Natural Language Descriptions 48 2.3 The Documentary Method of Interpretation 54 3. Conversation Analysis 57 3.1 The Production of Orderliness in Conversation 57 3.2 The Mutual Explication of Utterance and Context 58 3.3 The Empirical Investigation of Observable Details 60 3.4 Evidence 61 3.4.1 Sequential placement 62 3.4.2 Co-occurrence within a turn 62 3.4.3 Subsequent treatment 63 3.4.4 Discriminability 63 3.4.5 Exploitation of the object's properties 63 3.5 Criteria for Assessing the Adequacy of an Account 64 4. The Present Project 64 CHAPTER 3 : THE ESTABLISHMENT OF COMMON GROUND IN CONVERSATION: THE UTTERANCE PARTICLE LA 66 I. Previous Descriptions of LA 67 2. Reportings and Story-tellings 70 3. Listings and Instructions 84 4. Understanding Checks 89 5. Adequate Descriptions 94 6. Suggestions 105 7. Agreements 110 8. Pre-closings 113 i 9. LA as a resource for establishing common understanding 122 10. Summary 132 CHAPTER 4 : THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF ENDINGS IN CONVERSATION: THE UTTERANCE PARTICLE LO 134 1. Question-Answer Sequences 135 2. Reportings 151 3. Cognate Formulations 163 4. Confirmations 165 5. Suggestions 172 6. Advice-givings 175 7. Two Properties of LO 179 7.1 LO as a Dependency Token 179 7.2 LO as a Completion Proposal and a Topic Closure Device 180 8. The Management of Continuation and Extension : LA and LO 192 9. LO and the Production of Realities 208 9.1 The Uses of LO 208 9.2 Conclusions and punch lines 210 9.3 Unnoteworthiness and Obviousness 210 9.4 The "explanation" reading 211 9.5 Uncommunicativeness and Irresponsibility 212 CHAPTER 5 : EXPECTATION AND NOTEWORTHINESS: THE UTTERANCE PARTICLE WO 217 I. Reportings and Story-tellings 218 2. Challenging a Position 232 3. Contact-establishments 239 4. Disconfirmations 243 5. Thankings 247 6. Informings and Remindings 249 7. Realizations 259 8. Intuitions on WO 268 9. Expectation and Interpretation 276 CHAPTER 6 : UTTERANCE PARTICLES AS CONVERSATIONAL OBJECTS 281 1. The Meanings of Utterance Particles as a Product of the Interaction between their Presumed Underlying Properties and Sequential Contexts 281 2. Utterance Particles as Grammatical Markers of Sentence-types 288 3. Utterance Particles as Carriers of Attitudinal and Emotive Meanings 290 4. Utterance Particles as Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices 294 5. Utterance Particles as Discourse Markers 297 5.1 You know 298 5.2 well 300 5.3 OK 302 5.4 oh 302 5.5 The Systematic Contributions of Particles to Discourse Organization 304 6. Utterance Particles as Conversational Objects 304 6.1 Recipient Design 305 6.2 Sequential Organization 308 11 6.3 Preference Organization 309 6.4 Topic Organization 310 6.5 Conversational Charting 311 6.6 The Pervasiveness of Utterance Particles in Natural Conversation 313 CHAPTER 7 : THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 314 I. The Relevance of Conversation Analysis to Linguistics 314 1.1 Inter-disciplinary Considerations 314 1.2 Methodological Reappraisal 322 1.2.1 Linguistic data 322 1.2.2 Linguistic details 323 1.2.3 Evidence 324 1.2.4 Linguistics for the Hearer 324 1.2.5 A Badly Needed Empirical Tradition 325 2. Towards a Socially Constituted Linguistics 327 2.1 Traditional Sociolinguistics as a Social Adjunct to Linguistic Theory 327 2.2 A Socially Constituted Linguistics 331 Notes 336 References 344 Acknowledgements I wish to thank Steve Harlow and John Local for their constant guidance and help and unfailing support throughout the entire period of the planning and writing of this thesis. Heartfelt thanks too are due to Bob Le Page and Patrick Griffiths for intellectual stimulation as well as hospitality. I also owe a special debt to Tony Wootton and Paul Drew for their generosity with their time and attention, and, according to the biased view of the linguist at any rate, a rare interest in 'other languages' like Cantonese. Without their encouragement and constant support, a project like the present one would have been unthinkable. I must thank Gail Jefferson too for being so available for comments, and always so encouraging. I have been extremely fortunate to be at the University of York at a time when all of them were there, providing a serious and open intellectual atmosphere that is vital to productive research. My two years' of work on this project from 1985 to 1987 was made possible by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the form of an Academic Staff Scholarship, for which I am truly grateful. I also wish to thank the University of Hong Kong for giving me leave to take up the scholarship. Many friends and students have helped me a lot in obtaining speech data. In particular, I wish to thank Tang Tsui Yee, Tam Lai Fong, Ku Lap Hang, Philip Ng, Flora Tam, So Lai Fong, and Mak Yui Kwan. My sister Nim Tsz has for a period of time regularly recorded speech materials for me, for which I am very grateful. A special word of thanks to Patrick Yu for steering me through a great deal of deep panic when my micro broke down, and to Gloria for her encouragement and concern. In this regard, as in many other ways, Rajmil Fischman and Jan Rong Quei have always given me help and advice when they were most needed. The life of reading and writing under extreme pressure of time was alleviated somewhat by cheerful friends and neighbours during our stay in York. Dalit, Fang-mei, Cai-ping and Nobumi kept bringing life and activities to a house which was proving to be much too dry and stoical for human life. Azzouz Diafat and Shoko Kato brought much needed care and friendship. So did Alan Chan through his letters. I am grateful to my colleagues at the Department of English Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong for their encouragement and support: John Preston, Helen Kwok, Kingsley Bolton, Rosie Chen, and Owen and Cathy Nancarrow. Thanks too to Lai Jak Chung for technical support. Elaine Ho and Douglas Kerr have as always been understanding and encouraging. They kept me informed about Hong Kong, and the existence of an outside world generally, at a time when writing had confined me to an almost total seclusion from human reality. I owe a great deal to my parents for seeing me through at every stage of my work with great confidence. But most of all, I owe it all to Jennifer, to her love and care, her concern and encouragement, her patience and perseverance. None of this would have been possible without her. i v ABSTRACT A Conversation Analytic Approach to the Study of Utterance Particles in Cantonese Utterance particles, also known as modal particles or sentence-final particles, form a class of words in Cantonese which is of great descriptive and theoretical interest to linguists. Most of them do not have any semantic content (truth- conditional meaning), and few can be said to have a consistent grammatical function. They are notorious for being extremely resistant to conventional syntactic and semantic analysis. The aim of this thesis is to seek a better understanding of utterance particles by concentrating analytical attention on three of them; namely, LA (1a55), LO (1o55), and WO (wo44). Adopting a set of theoretical assumptions and analytical methods in the tradition of Conversation Analysis within an Ethnomethodological framework, an attempt is made to approach these objects by examining them in the context of interactional details in naturally occurring conversations. From this point of view, each of the three particles is found to be capable of performing an immense variety of work. LA has uses that are related to the establishment of common ground. LO contributes in interesting ways to the achievement of endings in narratives and other sequences. WO is responsive to sequential expectedness, and participates in preference organizations. However, rather than having a central, more or less fixed meaning, each of these particles has a set of properties which enter into intricate family relations with each other. The contribution that it makes to meanings-in-context at particular points in an unfolding social scene is to some extent the result of the contextualization of its properties in sequential environments. They are linguistic items which provide a resource for the management of a range of conversation organizational problems. To the extent that it has produced compelling accounts of, and fresh insights into these utterance particles, this study raises a number of theoretical and methodological considerations for linguistics, including the status of data and evidence in linguistic description and argumentation, as well as the possibility of a socially constituted linguistics.