Designed for Rejection: A-not-A Offers and Requests in Mandarin Chinese
| Panel: | P42 - Action Ascription |
| Author: | Kendrick, Kobin |
| Abstract: | |
| A recent line of CA research examines the role of syntactic design in the formation of particular social actions, such as offers of assistance (Curl 2006) and requests (Curl & Drew 2008). Following this line of inquiry, this paper presents an analysis of the design of offers and requests in Mandarin Chinese. In a collection of over 150 polar questions, drawn from conversation between speakers of Taiwanese Mandarin, the majority of offers and requests are found to occur in a particular format. The grammar of Mandarin includes two basic polar-interrogative formats, one which includes the particle ma and another which combines positive and negative verb forms into an A-not-A construction. Although A-not-A interrogatives are the less frequent of the two types, offers and requests that occur as questions are almost exclusively in the A-not-A format, as in (1) below. (1) Wu: Ey zhege man hao chi de, ni yao bu yao chi. PRT this really good eat PRT you want not want eat “Hey, these taste really good. Do you want some?” Gu: Bu yao. not want “No.” The affinity between the A-not-A format and offers and requests in Mandarin is argued to reflect a more general design principle: in the formation of actions which impose upon recipients, speakers recruit linguistic resources that build rejectability into the design of their talk. The use of both positive and negative verb forms in the A-not-A format lowers the threshold for rejection, since rejection can be done as confirmation with a partial repeat of the question format. A comparison with offers and requests in English suggests that the same principle operates through different resources in the two languages. |
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