Topic - 人稱代詞之中文口語言談功能探析:文類比較

In daily conversations, the topics mostly involve everyday events such as sports

or personal experiences, like raising dogs or dating. When exchanging daily talk, the speakers would express their views and ideas of the everyday events. The speakers involve people who either are acquainted with the speech participants or are specific people whom the speech participants can recognize. They seldom assume the voice of others in speech unless they intend to make their statements or arguments more vividness or to display opposing attitude toward the speech events implicitly (e.g. in (3.4), a male speaker’s use of other’s perspective in addressing his view on women receiving treat from men). As a result, it could account for the high frequency of the canonical, i.e., deictic wo and ni outnumber its atypical use in daily conversation: wo 18.8>0.7; ni 10.5>4.9 (see also Table 3.2). Furthermore, the few inclusion of the irrelevant unidentified third party is reflected in the lower frequency of the generic ta in daily conversations. The generic ta involves the third party mentioned in talk, and most of the referents are not the participants but an unrelated third party. Unless a third party is highly related to the current discourse, the constant involvement of the unknown third party would make speech participants lose interests in continuing the conversations.

By contrast, the topics in the TV interviews are of public issues. They are related to the current policy or reformation of current systems that affect people’s lives. To discuss a public issue would inevitably involve the conveyance of one’s opinions; however, the speech participants may agree or disagree with their opinions from others. By means of manipulating the personal pronouns, the speakers are able to make their attitudes toward the speech events shown in a less obvious way. For instance, the attitudes could be embedded in the self-exemplified impersonal wo. In our example, the journalist adopts the impersonal wo and considers herself the representative of the laborers who receive unequal treatment. In her statement, she argues against the current Labor Insurance system by identifying herself with the laborers with the use of impersonal wo. Though the impersonal wo embeds a speaker’s stance, it could mitigate the speaker’s tone and make him/her stand in a relatively neutral position (in comparison of adopting the deictic wo). The higher frequency of the impersonal wo in TV talk suggests that the speakers not only express their opinions through the impersonal wo, but also convery their thoughts/attitude toward the discussed event.

Sharing opinions publically could be a face-threatening act as the topic in each episode suggests the stance the program takes. It is proposed that the speakers would adopt the atypical use of personal pronouns in statements so that they won’t overly reveal their attitudes toward the events and lead to embarrassing situations if their opinions are not appreciated by the present speech participants. Asides from the impersonal wo, the use of the dramatic wo could serve as a way to handle this

face-threatening crisis. The dramatic wo is other-centric and enables the speaker to place themselves in a neutral position. By means of the alternation to another role, the speakers distance themselves from the current events, and thus the comments that follow could not be considered as the personal accounts. Even the use of the dramatic

wo could suggest a neutral and less biased perspective; however, as it is placed under

the program topic that would inevitably involve stance, the dramatic wo somewhat loses the function of staying neutral and implicates the speaker’s attitudes. Thus, though the speaker’s choice of the dramatic wo in TV talk would decrease the possibility of encountering face-threatening situations, it could covertly convey the speaker’s stance toward the current discourse event.

Besides, in TV talk, the topic that contains the public issues would extend to the discussion of the third party who is relevant to the discussed issue. Aside from the typical deictic use, the speakers would adopt two atypical uses of personal pronouns, i.e. dramatic ni and generic ta, when referring to those non-present people in TV interviews. The examples of the dramatic ni and the generic ta are given in (4.1) and (4.2). In (4.1), the journalist J speaks to a non-present participant who is related to the current event by switching the speech conext to a hypothetical one.

(4.1) J: 最後我們不能只相信說， finally guarantee responsibility instead demand say

 你要在條文寫，撥補，

90 will take the ultimate responsibility. Instead, (I) demand that you need to include the appropriation in laws. Because I need to know that if there is any problem in the further, how you would handle this situation and how you would make this tax loophole up. (You) should not just tell me that it’s fine, the government will back you up and we will definitely take the ultimate responsibility.’

(TV interviews)

In (4.2), the journalist presents his friends’/relatives’ opinions toward this discussed event, i.e. the insurance system benefits government workers more than laborers. This example appears in (3.19) and is restated as (4.2).

(4.2) J: 我們現在在討論這個過程當中，

Women xianzai zai taolun zhege guocheng dangzhong 1pl now DUR discuss this process amid

有很多軍公教的朋友，

you henduo jun gong jiao de pengyou have many solider public-servant teacher ASS friend

 我的親戚朋友當中也有，但他

J: ‘While we discuss, there are people who are soldiers, public servants and teachers—including my relatives and friends. S/he may contend that you should not keep talking about me. We are few in numbers, but these nine millions of works are none of my business. We have been working for so many years. Why don’t you choose to be one of us?

S/he has such attitude.’

(TV interviews)

It is observed that the speakers do not tend to speak highly of these non-participants as they adopt the dramatic ni or the generic ta in referring to the third party. In (4.1), the ni does not refer to the discourse participants or the audience, but indicates the decision-maker of the insurance policy with whom the speaker shows disagreement.

The speaker jumps into another context as if s/he were speaking directly to the third party. By directly referring to the decision-maker, the speaker creates a described context where their suggestion (i.e. usually accusation) to the policy-maker could be deliberately ‘overheard’ by the audience. The constant occurrence of the dramatic ni make the hearers feel as if they were in the described context and witness the confrontation of the speech participants. Also, the repeated occurrence of the dramatic

ni reinforces the speech tone in showing her disagreeing attitude toward the events

that involve the non-present participants to whom the speaker talks. As for the generic

ta in (4.2), it refers to the government workers who are related to the current

discussion and whom the speaker disagrees with. Instead of using the deictic third person plural, the speaker uses the generic ta. It suggests that the speaker would replace the plural form with the singular one when showing the opposing opinions.

The use of generic ta to show disagreement can also be found in daily conversations.

Example (4.3) is from daily conversations and it has appeared in (3.18).

The speaker complains that some people are not willing to make contribution to the church but they can enjoy the facilities in church for free. The generic ta and vague tamen are used to indicate these people.

J: ‘There are many people inTaipei churches who gathers here. Why would they come? It is because they can stay here where the air-conditioner is freely provided.’

L: ‘Mm, mm.’

J: ‘No, when (you) ask him/her to make contribution, s/he is willing to do so, right? (They) do not identify with the church, that is, the church is not his/her spiritual home. When it comes to making financial contribution to build a church, they evade this.’

(Daily conversations)

In (4.3), we can see that the generic ta and vague tamen are employed in talk when the speaker expresses opposing attitudes to the third part(ies). It is suggested that in daily conversations, the speaker would pick either the generic ta or the vague tamen when showing disagreeing remarks, while in TV interviews, the generic ta seems to be of primary choice.

4.3 Summary

The interplay of speech goals and topics works collaboratively to explain for the frequency and function discrepancy in the non-canonical use of Chinese personal pronouns in the two speech genres. Firstly, the speech goal accounts for the asymmetric frequency of the impersonal wo, ni and the dramatic wo, ni in the two speech genres. The fundamental goal in TV interviews is to attract viewers’ attention and invite their participation. The speakers would frequently adopt both the impersonal wo and ni to show credibility and establish authority and the dramatic wo and ni to involve hearers. Additionally, the tension in constructing the authority and

maintaining the common ground in TV talk could be resolved by using the impersonal

ni, for it contains the dual effect of establishing the authority and involving others. As

for the daily conversations, the speakers aims at obtaining the interpersonal relation in speech and employ the vague nimen comparatively more often in attracting participants’ involvement. Furthermore, since the speech purpose in daily conversations is participant-oriented, the inclusion of unidentified others is few (i.e.

low frequency of the generic ta), and the identification of the third party is unnecessary as they either are less relevant or can be inferred from the discourse context (i.e. higher frequency of the vague and inferred tamen). In responding to the discussed topics in TV talk, speakers adopt the impersonal wo and the dramatic wo to express their supportive or opposing opinions, and their uses contribute to a higher frequency in the two uses in TV interviews. Nevertheless, while engaging in everyday events, the speakers would place greater focus on the current speech participants, which leads to a higher occurrence frequency of the deictic first and second person singular. As for the inclusion of others in daily conversations, the deictic pronouns tend to be employed more frequently, and in TV discourse, the speakers would adopt the typical deictic pronouns as well as the dramatic ni and the generic ta. In overall term, speech goals and topics interact cooperatively with each other to contribute to speakers’ atypical uses of the Chinese personal pronouns in the two speech genres.

Chapter Five Conclusion

Previous studies place emphasis more on the categorical classification and contextual description in the discussion of the non-canonical use of personal pronouns in distinct languages. The investigation of these proposed atypical uses in different speech genres has not been formally conducted. The current study explores how these atypical Chinese personal pronouns are used in the two spoken genres, i.e. daily conversations and TV interviews. The central purposes lie in exploring whether the categories in preceding work could be found in different speech genres and whether the distributional or functional distinction in the two speech contexts could be found.

The current results show that most atypical uses of personal pronouns observed in previous studies can be located in our databanks. However, the distribution frequency of these uses is uneven.²⁰ The atypical use of the singular personal pronouns occurs more frequent in TV interviews, while that of the plural personal pronouns obtains relatively higher frequency in daily conversations. These observed discrepancies in distribution are proposed to result from the generic difference.

The current study argues that the interaction of the two factors, speech goals and topics contributes to the frequency distinction in speech genres. People incorporate the non-canonical use of personal pronouns to engage talk with dissimilar topics in different speech contexts. These atypical pronouns would be influenced by speaker’s communicative goal embedded in the discussed topics. The purposes and topics in public and private talk are distinguishable. The former aims to catch the hearers’ attention and invite their involvement in participating in the discussion of the public issues, while the latter focuses more on the maintenance of the interpersonal relation in sharing daily events with the current speech participant. As a result of the differences in speech genres, the asymmetric freuqency of the canonical deictic use and the non-canonical use in distinct genres occurs. Consequently, the present work proposes that speech genres could lead to distribution and function discrepencies in the non-canonical use of personal pronouns. It is worth further comparing the written or spoken genres in different languages to explore whether genre differences in terms of the use of personal pronouns can be obtained across languages.

20 In daily conversation, the projective use in the second personal singular and the dramatic use in the third person singular are not found. In TV interviews, the vague use of the second person plural and the dramatic use of the third person plural are absent.

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在文檔中人稱代詞之中文口語言談功能探析:文類比較 (頁 97-108)