This document is downloaded from DR‑NTU (https://dr.ntu.edu.sg) Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Action formation with janwai in Cantonese Chinese conversation Liesenfeld, Andreas Maria 2019 Liesenfeld, A. M. (2019). Action formation with janwai in Cantonese Chinese conversation. Doctoral thesis, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/102660 https://doi.org/10.32657/10220/47757 Downloaded on 25 Sep 2021 22:28:06 SGT ACTION FORMATION WITH JANWAI IN CANTONESE CHINESE CONVERSATION ANDREAS MARIA LIESENFELD SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 2019 Action formation with janwai in Cantonese Chinese conversation Andreas Maria Liesenfeld School of Humanities and Social Sciences A thesis submitted to the Nanyang Technological University in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 Statement of Originality I hereby certify that the work embodied in this thesis is the result of original research, is free of plagiarised materials, and has not been submitted for a higher degree to any other University or Institution. 01/03/2019 . Date Andreas Maria Liesenfeld Authorship Attribution Statement This thesis contains material from one paper published from papers accepted at conferences in which I am listed as the author. Chapter 3 is published as Liesenfeld, Andreas. "MYCanCor: A Video Corpus of spoken Malaysian Cantonese." Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). 7-12 May 2018. Miyazaki, Japan. (2018). http://aclweb.org/anthology/L18-1122. 01/03/2019 . Date Andreas Maria Liesenfeld Acknowledgements I would like to thank the people I have met in Perak, who have been so amiable and welcoming during my stay in Malaysia and who have made my work there such a pleasant and rewarding experience. My gratitude goes to everybody who agreed to be recorded, sharing so much of their social life with me as I was traveling through the watery plains and Karst mountains of Perak, through the city of Ipoh and through the many villages in the area. After returning to Singapore, I started watching some of these recordings over and over, exploring details of all your intricate ways of doing things with words. Sometimes this made me feel strangely familiar with many of you, even though we may only have met for a couple of minutes. It is astounding what only a minute long recording can unveil if one only observes careful enough. It was a rewarding journey and I have come to deeply appreciate this line of work under the umbrella of Conversation Analysis, its attention to detail and its observant attitude. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Luke Kang Kwong for introducing this method to me, and for your guidance and continuous support of my professional development throughout the past years as well as the countless learning opportunities I was provided with at NTU and beyond. My sincere gratitude also goes to Professor Hiroko Tanaka for her unwavering support during the critical last stages of the writing process. Thank you for your invaluable feedback all the way from my first to my tenth draft and thank you for your dedication to teach me accurate scientific writing. I would also like to thank Takashi Nakagawa for his friendship and support during my fieldwork in Malaysia, for hiking the Cameron Highlands with me and for the many nights sitting on that rooftop, drinking Port wine. My warmest thanks goes to all my teachers and colleagues at Nanyang Technological University, especially those who I had the pleasure working with during our weekly data sessions. Thank you for the fruitful discussions and support Professor Lim Ni Eng, Professor Kim Younhee, Yvonne Tse Crepaldi, Ratih Oktarini and Ng Gim Thia. I also thank Professor Zhang Songjian for his generous support and help during my time studying with him. I thank Professor Laura Kallmeyer for her invitation to visit the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and all the valuable lessons and opportunities working with her and the rest of the team in Germany, especially Vladan Sutanovac for his friendship and company exploring Düsseldorf. Finally, I extend sincere expressions of gratitude to my family in Cologne and Guangzhou as well as to, the one and only, Chen Shiwei. “J’ai tant rêvé de toi que tu perds ta réalité.” – Robert Desnos Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Acronyms vi Symbols and transcription conventions vii Lists of Figures ix Lists of Tables x Summary xi 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation .......................................... 1 1.2 Objectives and Specifications ................................ 2 1.3 Major contribution ..................................... 2 1.4 Organisation of the Dissertation .............................. 2 2 Literature review 4 2.1 Defining concepts ...................................... 4 2.1.1 Units of analysis .................................. 4 2.1.2 Action formation and ascription .......................... 7 2.1.3 The problem of action coding and typologies ................... 10 2.2 Engines of sequence organization .............................. 11 2.2.1 Epistemic status .................................. 11 2.2.2 Deontic status .................................... 12 2.2.3 Agency ....................................... 13 2.2.4 Type-conformity .................................. 13 2.2.5 Front-loading .................................... 14 2.3 Prior work on janwai ( ) and approximates in other languages ............ 15 2.3.1 Causal connectors and causal coherence markers ................. 15 2.3.2 Interactional studies of causal markers ....................... 17 2.4 The practice of accounting and the formation of accounts ................. 19 3 The Malaysia Cantonese Corpus (MYCanCor) 23 3.1 Technical specifications ................................... 24 3.2 Data collection and sampling ................................ 24 3.3 Transcription ........................................ 25 3.3.1 Word segmentation and annotation ......................... 26 3.4 Use in this study and beyond ................................ 27 3.4.1 Subject of this study: janwai-initial structures ................... 27 3.4.2 Data representations and transcriptions used in this study ............. 28 3.4.3 The sequential environment of janwai TCUs in the corpus ............ 29 3.4.4 Types of sequential environments: Grouping of similar sequential structures in the corpus ...................................... 29 4 Sequential environment 1: janwai-prefaced response formats 32 4.1 Initiating actions followed by a response with a turn-initial janwai ............ 33 4.1.1 Data discussion ................................... 34 4.1.2 Deviant case analysis: Self-initiated repair of the turn-initial janwai ....... 43 4.2 Chapter summary ...................................... 44 5 Sequential environment 2: janwai as part of response formats 47 5.1 Responsive action featuring response tokens followed by janwai ............. 48 5.1.1 Responsive actions featuring janwai following Telling-questions ......... 49 5.1.2 Data discussion ................................... 50 5.1.3 Section summary .................................. 54 5.1.4 Responsive actions featuring janwai following Specifying-questions ....... 54 5.1.5 Data discussion ................................... 54 5.1.6 Section summary .................................. 62 5.2 Other patterns: Responses featuring janwai me1 aa1 or janwai zou6 me1 ......... 63 5.2.1 Data discussion ................................... 63 5.2.2 Section summary .................................. 70 5.3 Chapter Summary ...................................... 70 6 Sequential environment 3: janwai as part of (non-responsive) action formats 74 6.1 ‘Step-by-step’ production of janwai-structures as part of the formation of initiating action 75 6.1.1 Data discussion ................................... 75 6.1.2 Section Summary .................................. 82 6.2 ‘In-one-go’ production of janwai as part of the formation of initiating action ....... 83 6.2.1 Data discussion ................................... 83 6.2.2 Section summary .................................. 88 6.3 Other patterns: Formation of ‘back-tying’ involving janwai ................ 88 6.3.1 Data discussion ................................... 89 6.3.2 Section Summary .................................. 94 6.4 Other patterns: The misalignment utterance m4 hai6 followed by janwai ......... 94 6.4.1 Data discussion ................................... 95 6.4.2 Section Summary ..................................100 6.5 Other patterns: Janwai following an initiating action and a me1 final particle ......101 6.5.1 Data discussion ...................................101 6.5.2 Section Summary ..................................105 6.6 Chapter summary ......................................105 7 Other sequential environments 108 7.1 Turn-initial janwai in environments with three or more speakers .............109 7.1.1 Data discussion ...................................109 7.1.2 Section summary ..................................114 7.2 Usage of janwai to express cause-effect relations between utterances ...........114 7.2.1 Data discussion ...................................114 7.2.2 Section summary ..................................121 7.3 Usage of janwai + noun phrase ..............................121 7.3.1 Data discussion ...................................121 7.3.2 Section summary ..................................125 7.3.3 Chapter summary