| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 84 === The aim of this study is to investigate how gambits are
manipulated inMandarin spoken discourse to facilitate the
progression of conversation.This investigation is expected to
increase people''s understanding on howthese conversational
tools work, and simultaneously, to provide guidelinesto
those who are not familiar with the use of Mandarin gambits
in spokendiscourse. The gambits identified in the corpus are
first presented withinKeller''s (1981) framework to offer a
general picture of gambits in Mandarin.Nevertheless, the
unexplained part of the data attests to the deficiency ofthe
framework, and proposals are then made to modify it from
both the''within'' and ''without'' of the framework. By ''within''
it is meant to recovertwo subtypes included in an earlier
format but excluded by Keller''s (1981)framework, and by
''without'' it is meant to supplement new subtypes to
theframework, with the hope that the revised new scheme would
account for most,if not all, of the gambits identified in the
data. From a closer examinationof the data, Mandarin speakers''
preference of certain gambits is revealed,along with our
finding that one of Keller''s two crucial criteria in
defininggambits is in practice difficult to implement, due to
its inherent ambiguity,which is further complicated by the
fact that gambits appear in varyinglocations in spoken
Mandarin. Besides, two crucial sociolinguistic factors--
speakers'' gender and social settings-- are investigated to
reveal the effectsthey have on speaker''s choices of gambits.
Study from this perspectivediscloses male speakers'' confident
and assertive style of speaking and femaleones'' weak and
supportive style, as reflected from their choices of gambits
inconversation. This phenomenon, we believe, results from men''s
superior statusand women''s subordinate position in the
society. All these results, webelieve, can serve as
preliminary guidance for Mandarin learners. The 500 orso
gambits in the corpus offer practical help to Mandarin
learners as to howto use the right gambits to properly
organize their speech. Besides, ourfindings elicited from the
discourse and sociolinguistic analysis of the datamay serve as
guidelines to instruct Mandarin learners so that their choices
ofgambits can match the setting and their gender and enable
them to appear morelike native Mandarin speakers.
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