This is an investigation into conflict and discord in conversations between couples in ordinary households in mainland China. Based on a corpus of face-to-face and telephone conversations in Mandarin, our analysis shows that participants’ arguments are ‘kept under control’ through a variety of communicative practices that in a variety of ways mitigate or reduce the force of their arguments. Prominent among those mitigating practices are repair initiation through repetition, type-nonconforming responses, and turn-ending double particles. The result of employing these and (...) other practices is that the couples in our data ‘bicker’ – they argue in such a way that the interactions do not result in breakdown, or otherwise in irreversible breakdown. The communicative practices reported here are mobilised so as to suppress, reduce or moderate the hostility that a complaint for instance might otherwise generate. Our analysis contributes to our understanding of disaffiliation and argument in ordinary interaction, especially in Chinese domestic interactions. (shrink)

This study examines Nǐ yìsi shì X ‘Your Meaning is X’ as a practice of doing other-initiation in Mandarin conversations, focusing on how it addresses different sources of troubles systematically in informing sequences. It is found that while ‘Nǐ yìsi shì’ signals the speaker’s having trouble with the prior informing turn, ‘X’ is deployed to locate different aspects of the trouble source, being shaped by how an informing emerges in talk-in-interaction. Specifically, when following a volunteered informing, ‘X’ is usually built (...) to clarify specific words or phrases in preceding informing, thereby treating a certain element as underspecified or ambiguous. However, when following a question-solicited informing, ‘X’ is typically constructed to work out what the provided information exactly conveys, indicating the whole informing turn/action is in some way problematic, inappropriate, or inapposite. In both cases, ‘Nǐ yìsi shì X’ serves as an OI, working to target different kinds of the trouble source, and simultaneously proposes a potential solution to it. (shrink)