Event Details

Prof. Vittorio Tantucci delivers a talk on the culture-specific aspects of formulating opinions in Chinese. Part of the LU Confucius Institute / China Centre joint seminar series.

Abstract:

“How do we say what we think? Is the way we formulate evaluations and opinions culture-specific? In this paper we adopted a corpus-based approach to analyse pragmatic and textual mismatches that exist from Mandarin Chinese to American English Interaction. We fitted a conditional inference tree model (Hothorn et al., 2006; Tantucci & Wang 2018) that simulates large-scale interactional choices in the two languages, based on the two balanced corpora of spontaneous telephone conversation (CallHome).

Our results indicate that while American English evaluations are distinctively subjective and markedly speaker-oriented, Chinese opinions are conventionally formulated as a joint project (cf. Clark 1996) and are pre-emptively aimed at intersubjective agreement among interlocutors (Tantucci 2020). This is pragmatically achieved via specific markers of epistemic cooperation and ad hoc strategies of harmonious rapport-maintenance (Goffman 1967; Spencer-Oatey 2008). Large-scale analysis of naturalistic interaction as such has the potential to inform research in intercultural communication and the study of interactional behaviour in social sciences in general. The culture-specific modality in which we state what we think is a fundamental area of research for advancing cross-cultural awareness and (im-)politeness research”.

Speaker Bio:

Prof. Vittorio Tantucci is Lecturer of Chinese and Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK. His publications focus on usage-based intersections of pragmatics and cognition. These issues are addressed typologically and cross-culturally, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. His recent major publications include Language and Social Minds: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Intersubjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 2021); “Resonance and engagement through (dis-)agreement: Evidence of persistent constructional priming from Mandarin naturalistic interaction” ” (Journal of Pragmatics 2021, authored with Aiqing Wang); “Diachronic change of rapport orientation and sentence-periphery in Mandarin” (Discourse Studies 2020; authored with Aiqing Wang), “From co-actionality to extended intersubjectivity: Drawing on language change and ontogenetic development” (Applied Linguistics 2020).