Issues in Applied Linguistics

Within the framework of conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974), this paper investigates how Mandarin speakers negotiate their participatory roles in multi-party conversation through the use of linguistic and non-linguistic resources. Specifically, the present paper focuses on two sequential contexts: (1) parties who have otherwise been playing a marginal role try to make themselves focal, and (2) others incorporate a previously not actively participating party.

Close examination of video- and audio-recorded naturally occurring ordinary conversation reveals that one of the linguistic resources recurrently employed in these two contexts is a turn-initial discourse particle plus an additional turn component. The data also show that different particle-plus-other component structures are regularly accompanied by different body movements, which seem to embody the speaker's orientation to the degree of disjunctiveness of what is going to be projected in the particle-prefaced turn and how it relates to the current organization of interaction and its topic.