Weng2026
| Weng2026 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Weng2026 |
| Author(s) | Zehui Weng |
| Title | “Listen to me”: Multimodal calibration of accountability and turn-claiming in Mandarin citizen-official encounters |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Conversation analysis, Institutional interaction, Multimodality, Honorific address, Intervention, Mandarin Chinese |
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| Year | 2026 |
| Language | English |
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| Month | |
| Journal | Journal of Pragmatics |
| Volume | 265 |
| Number | November 2026 |
| Pages | 67-88 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.pragma.2026.09.002 |
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Abstract
Intervening in an authority figure’s ongoing talk poses a recurrent interactional problem in institutional encounters: how to secure speakership while orienting to institutional asymmetry. Drawing on video-recorded, multimodal conversation-analytic data from district-level government petition reception encounters in northeastern China, this article examines how citizens accomplish such mid-turn, floor-halting interventions, and shows that their design is systematically calibrated to the sequence’s interactional valence. In disaffiliative environments, citizens predominantly deploy the directive ting wo shuo (“listen-I-speak”) to intercept resistant trajectories, pre-empt unfavorable institutional framings, or escalate accusations. In affiliative sequences, they instead produce declarative announcements paired with intense embodied deference to collaboratively pivot the course of action. Across both trajectories, citizens assemble locally fitted multimodal configurations—combining address forms and temporal minimizers with embodied conduct such as gestures and posture shifts—through which they halt talk, secure speakership, and manage moral accountability. The study contributes to research on institutional interaction, multimodality, and pragmatics by demonstrating how participation rights and deontic agency are renegotiated through the real-time coordination of talk and embodied conduct.
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