Chinese Discourse and Interaction - Theory and Practice - Yuling Pan
10. Customer–employee interaction from a diachronic perspective
Chinese Discourse and Interaction - Theory and Practice - Yuling Pan
Hao Sun
Indiana-Purdue University
Description
Approaching discourse analysis from a diachronic perspective, the research described in this chapter examines Chinese telephone interactions between customer callers and employee recipients. Built on the author’s previous research (Sun 1998, 2004, 2008), the current study compares data obtained recently with a comparable set collected over a decade ago, aiming to identify and characterise shifts and changes in business employees’ discourse as observed recently in customer-employee telephone discourse interactions in mainland China. This situated discourse analysis contributes to the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and cross-cultural studies in that it provides an up-to-date, detailed account of Chinese discourse interactions based on customer-employee telephone interactions.