The schematic representations of the various instantiations of the qíshí construc-tion and their corresponding social acconstruc-tion formats can thus be diagrammed as below:
(25) The schema of the qíshí construction
To do disalignment To do disalignment To do A-event disclosing or confession
To create humorous effect
X: makes a claim
Y: disaligns with X by using the qíshí clause Z: justifies by using the yīnwèi/kěshì clause
As shown in Schema (25), the qíshí is an interactionally motivated construction: It is used to disalign with what is claimed or assumed in the prior turn and is usually produced in the second part of a three-part sequence. The qíshí in Variation 1(A), but not in 1(B) or 1(C), is quite often preceded by an agreement marker, showing speaker B’s intention to do alignment with speaker A, or less frequently, with some third party.
Note that the justification, the third part of the sequence, namely a yīnwèi or kěshì clause, normally occurs in Variation 1(B) and 1(C), but not in 1(A), since disalignment is usually a dispreferred move which needs justification or explanation. When speaker B is about to do disalignment with the other party, as in Variation 1(B), his/her turn is often prefaced by an obvious pause, hesitator, or hedge. In Variation 2, the qíshí clause usually occurs in the turn-initial position. As our data reveal, however, the clause is interpretable as a second move in social interaction: First some assumed belief of A’s is made relevant to the ongoing interaction and then B is prompted to do confession in order to address A’s belief. Finally, the social action formats of the qíshí construction can clearly be seen to be part of the competence of Mandarin speakers, since parties to conversation perform actions with their turns oriented towards the action sequence, as demonstrated by the incongruity and thus the humorous effect, perceived by the speaker C at Line 74 in (24). The wide heterogeneity of the qíshí construction as instantiated in the corpus attests to the rich and complex social actions that each can be deployed to perform.
Analyses of naturally spoken data reveal that grammar is an inventory of grammaticized recurrent patterns, i.e. constructions, emerging from the crucible of social interaction. Grammatical knowledge resides not only in the knowledge of syntactic structure, but also in the knowledge of how each construction is intended to carry out what social action. By examining how conversation interactants are mutually attuned to various constructions to accomplish intended social actions, we can get a better picture of the socially shared nature of grammatical knowledge (cf. Schegloff 1991).
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[Received 30 March 2005; revised 1 September 2005; accepted 6 September 2005]
Fuhui Hsieh
Graduate Institute of Linguistics National Taiwan University 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road Taipei 106, Taiwan hsiehfh@ms64.hinet.net Shuanfan Huang sfhuang@ntu.edu.tw