Identity and authority in the lay-bureaucratic encounter: A case study in Mandarin Chinese

Using Conversation Analysis (CA) as its research method, this thesis explores how Chinese citizens and officials manage and construct their relevant institutional identities in meetings where citizens are petitioning officials. In the CA literature, it is widely acknowledged that in institutional talk, rights to the floor are standardly asymmetrically distributed between lay people and institutional personnel (Drew & Heritage, 1992). Through analyzing 21 hours of videoed citizen-official interactions, this study investigates how, in terms of turn-taking organization, the co-interactants’ institutionally asymmetric relationship is “talked into being” (Heritage, 1984b: 237). It focuses on two types of directive actions that the speakers use to lay claim to the floor: 1) one party calling a halt to the other party’s ongoing talk or course of action, and 2) granting the other the floor in second position, while the permission is apparently not sought by the prior speaker. By comparing how the two parties formulate these two actions with linguistic (e.g., lexis, syntax, Chinese particle ba) and bodily (e.g., hands, face, eye gaze) resources in various sequential contexts, this study illustrates that while the lead officials are oriented to by the citizens and the lead officials themselves as the authority in controlling the floor, the citizens do not submit to it in the first place; and that the lead officials do not claim absolute authority in taking the floor. This thesis aims to show that identity, rather than being a static notion or a label attributed to an individual, is an interactional achievement, and deontic authority is not an all- or-nothing phenomenon but a negotiation that involves an initial claim to authority by one party and subsequent compliance or resistance by the other.