（外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文）公司会议议题管理的个案研究.pdf

论文摘要 会议是公司必不可少的一种交流形式 公司会议的最终目的是要求全体人员共同努力 来完成一项任务 通过集思广益, 挖掘出最好的想法 关于会议有很多相关的研究 一种研究倾向于商业操作方面, 主要是关于开会或参加 会议的策略或技巧 另一种研究则是语言学研究, 关注的是会议的语言特点, 关系管理,会 议互动和类型分析等 所有这些研究都对会议的各个方面的性质提供了有价值的分析和见解 然而对会议议 题的研究相对缺乏 议题是会议的一个基本的要素 议题讨论的完成被认为是一个圆满 会议的标志 这篇论文试图把重点放在公司会议的议题管理上: 议题的各项内容是如何被引入并推 进的? 他们是否存在某种共同的模式? 会议的运作是否采用了某种策略技巧? 为了寻找议 题上的各项要讨论的内容, 我们采用了”话题”这一概念 通过对话题相关研究的回顾, 我 们了解到话题是一个很主观的概念许多企图寻找一种客观的解释都以失败告终 在这篇 文章里, 我们采用 brown和 yule 的“说话者话题” (speakers topic) 与 goutsos 的“表层特征” (sequential features) 相结合的方法来进行分析 语料由两个公司会议组成: 一个是英文会议, 另一个是中文会议 中文会议是现场录 音的真实会议由于获取英文会议的途径有限, 我们所得到的英文会议是一个英国广播公 司制作的商务教学节目 我们寻找出整个会议中每一个说话者的话题 一般来说, 这两个会议都是由会议主持 把握着话题控制权 主持的议题就是会议的议题 主持对议题的操纵采用了如下的技巧: 1) 议题宣布 2) 话轮规定 3) 寻求同意或一致 4) 任务分配 5) 总结 6)赞同表扬 会议的参与者大多数情况下遵从主持的议题, 并促进议题的进程 他们的话轮一般是 由主持规定的如果说主持是船长的话, 那他们就是划船的人 但有时候某个参与者的话 题可能与主持的话题冲突, 在这时, 通常主持会将这个参与者的话题压下去, 按照主持或是 会议的议题进行 这种情形可能与主持在公司的职位有关 这份研究对公司会议话语进行了描写, 其研究结果可为会议参与者提供参考和帮助 但由于现实中会议的多样性, 我们的研究在实践应用或规则指导方面有一定的局限性进 一步的研究可考虑扩大语料的种类搜集 abstract meetings are an indispensable part of corporate life. the overall purpose of a corporate meeting lies in performing a task on a collective basis, and bringing the best idea out of the individual participants. there have been many researches on meetings. one line of research on meetings is business-oriented, which mostly concerns the strategies or skills in chairing or attending a meeting. the other one is linguistic studies, which ranges from the language features, the relational management to the interactive processes and generic analysis of meetings. all these studies glean valuable insights into meetings. but what is lacking is a focus on the agenda, one essential constituent of a meeting. it is suggested that the accomplishment of the agenda is the symbol of a fertile meeting. this thesis is an attempt to focus on the agenda management of corporate meetings: how are the items on the agenda introduced, and pushed forward one by one? in what patterns do they appear and what techniques are adopted for the facilitation of movement? for the tracing of each item on the agenda, the notion of topic is adopted. a review of the numerous works on topic suggests that topic is quite an intuitive notion. many methods developed for an objective tracing of topic have ended in failure. for our purpose, we have to combine a subjective notion of speakers topic by brown 2) using appropriate interactive strategies, independence or interdependence, and linguistic items. boden (1994) examines the organizational agenda in a university meeting. a meeting does not involve only one agenda. the organizational agenda is interwoven with the individual agenda. he lays his emphasis on the analysis of the techniques employed by the participants to smuggle their individual concerns artfully into the sequential flow of interaction. for example, one of the strategies is to tie ones own local plan to the long-term affirmative action goals of the institution. 1.3 significance of this study studies in other aspects of meetings surely throw much light on agenda 4 management. however, agenda management in meetings remains unduly underresearched, which justify the present study. according to boden (1994), people come together around some shared sense of current need or because of some pressing issue that is being discovered in the course of a series of work tasks or interdepartmental collaborations. agendas are, in turn, the departmental and organizational plans, policies and strategies that locate this talk and this activity. then how are these plans, policies and strategies encoded linguistically? how are the items on the agenda gradually carried out through conversational interaction? this thesis intends to explore these questions by following the notion of topic. the relevance of the notion “topic” to “agenda” is elaborated in boden (1994:156): to define an organizational agenda is to define not so much a specific conversational procedure in talk as to describe a talk-based activity through which organizational members pursue local issues, maintain and advance departmental positions, and occasionally even follow a slated agenda. their management is akin to topic management in that they are achieved through shifts of emphasis and rekeyings that are placed with precision in the ongoing flow of talk. often, participants move “stepwise” toward or away from a particular topic, while simultaneously “holding” their own agenda intact across these interactional shifts and across interactions. although boden also adopts the notion “topic” for his agenda analysis, he does not give any detailed description of this notion, which as shown in chapter 2, is quite intuitive in nature, nor is any evidence offered for the application of the notion to the identification of agenda. this thesis, therefore, is to bring together some ideas of “topic” and tries to set up a model for its identification and application in order to contribute to a better understanding of agenda management in corporate meetings. hence, we hope this thesis will be of some value to the understanding of the notion of topic, topic tracing methods, and some potential techniques adopted for topic 5 introduction, change, shift or ending in corporate meetings, which constitute our main concern. 6 chapter 2 the notion of topic in this chapter, we are going to review the various works on topic. there seems to be a lack of consensus on the notion. this may be due to several factors: first, its intuitive nature; second, the terminological confusion of the notion employed; third, the multitude properties it possesses. these respects will be examined in the chapter, followed by a review of the various studies of topic from different perspectives. 2.1 the intuitive appeal of topic in reviewing the works on topic, one is struck by the almost total lack of consensus among linguists regarding the nature, the defining characteristics, and the scope of application of the notion. the only opinion that seems to be widely shared is that this area is riddled with problems. according to brown b. informational status; c. linearity. and these three interpretations correspond to three facets of topic in different linguistic categories: a. semantic, suggesting that topic establishes a relationship of aboutness expressing “what a message is about”; b. informational, rendering topic as given information; c. syntactic, assuming that topic constitutes a special point of departure that is associated with initial position, i.e. “from which the speaker proceeds”. these three facets are also included in goutsoss classification of properties 10 related to topic (see table 1). the aboutness view of topic is perhaps the most frequent, and as such it is usually extended to the topic of a conversation or a written text, which is then identified with the referents (i.e. topic entities) or the main propositions. as to the departure point of view, it is taken as more than a convenient metaphor. fries (quoted in goutsos 1997) tries to pin down the metaphor by considering topic to be a framework within which the rest of the sentence can be interpreted. although thompson (2000) suggests that hallidays theme notion, which is viewed as the point of departure for a message, can function as the signal of the maintenance or progression of what the text is about, the interpretation of discourse topic based on the left-most constituents of sentences is far from straightforward (goutsos 1997). there are two more facets listed in the table: structural and pragmatic properties. the structural property takes the view that topic is a discrete element, expressed as a distinct constituent, either explicitly, in the surface structure, or in the underlying structure. furthermore, topic must always be present. these structural claims imply that topic has a grammatical function. individual approaches may specify further grammatical conditions for topic. for example, lautamatti (1987) proposes the topical-subject notion, which is encoded in the position of subject. at last, the facet of pragmatic prominence is prototypically related to the pragmatic properties of definiteness, focus of attention, and so on. it is obvious that each individual approach does not subscribe to all its facets. the highlighting of certain facets of topic at the expense of others accounts for the different ways in which the notion is understood. 11 1. structural a. discrete b. constituent c. explicit d. obligatory 2. presentation point of departure a. leftmost or initial constituent b.framework or orientation c.deictic 3.logical aboutness a. propositional b. predicational c. referential d. presuppositional 4. informational a. context-dependent b. given-new c. old (predictable, salient, shared) d. definite 5. pragmatic prominence a. center of focus of attention b. uniquely identifiable c. familiar figure 2. properties related to topic 2.4 studies of topic from what perspective 2.4.1 topic as a discrete constituent hallidays notion of theme hallidays (2000) theme has often been adopted in topic studies. theme, according to him, is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message: it is that with which the clause is concerned. theme is not simply the left-most constituent of a clause. “the theme extends from the beginning of the clause up to (and including) the first element that has a function in transitivity” (halliday 2000:53). this means that the theme of a clause ends with the first constituent that is either participant, circumstance, or process. this element is called the topical theme (halliday 2000:53). there currently exists some debate as to the way the boundary of theme is delimited. for example, berry (quoted in ravelli1992) argues that the boundary of 12 theme should be extended to include everything that is pre-verb. this permits complex themes, which include more than one topical theme, as in (3) on saturday, there is a market (ravelli 1995, citing berry ) (4) the alternative to dogmatic realism, fortunately, is not (ravelli 1995, citing berry) examples as these are different from the more strictly hallidayan examples where neither there nor fortunately would be analysed as thematic. according to ravelli (1995), any initial element of the clause will be taken to open the thematic path; once a candidate for a topical element is reached, steps into further elements will be taken to close the thematic path and open the rheme. for example, (5) and there this morning protesters gathered again after dawn (ravelli 1995) a hallidayan analysis of theme would have to conclude that the theme path closes after there, yet this morning and protesters seem to be just as much a departure point of the message as is there. the first element, and, opens a theme path, and is a textual theme. the next element, there, is a topical theme, and at this point, a hallidayan analysis would analyse the thematic path as being completed. however, other ideational elements may follow, and as the subject has not yet been definitively analysed, there is still a sense in which the departure point of the message has not yet been fully elaborated. ideationally, there is a sense that the departure point of the clause is not fully elaborated until the process is reached. once there is an element, which is not only thematic but also likely to be functioning as subject, the ideational information is expected to increase imminently, and the departure point of the message is therefore fully elaborated. the subject indicates a core element of the clause around which a great deal of information hinges. another problem raised by goutsos (1997) is related to the unit of application of 13 theme: is it the clause or the sentence? it seems that both apply (halliday 2000:57): if winter comes can spring be far behind theme1 rheme1 theme2 rheme2 theme3 rheme3 figure3.theme in the clause complex however, “if the answer is both, what is the actual relation between clause-level and sentence-level themes? halliday (2000) did not discuss how hypotaxis and parataxis affect the identification of themes and rhemes” (goutsos1997). halliday (2000) mentions that thematic organization is concerned with how speakers or writers construct their messages so that they may fit smoothly into the text around them. he gives a detailed description of thematic organization both above the clause and below it, but he did not actually develop a description of topic for any level above the sentence. thompson (1996) has tried to look at theme from a slightly broader perspective, and to explore how theme choices work together through a text to signal its underlying coherence. however, according to goutsos (1997), the main approach to discourse topic within the systemic functional linguistics is found in fries (quoted in goutsos 1997), who argues that the information expressed in the (hallidayan) themes of all the sentences of a paragraph constitutes the method of development for that paragraph, i.e. the discourse topic is studied as a corollary of sentence topic. the approach is confronted with problems, as manifested by goutsos (1997): hallidyan themes are not always helpful for grasping the overall organization of expository texts. the main content areas can be discerned from the first ideational constituents, but there is no systematic way of establishing the correlation of position with the larger organization. it also seems unlikely that all initial elements would have the same significance in the unfolding of discourse topic. discourse topic cannot simply stem from the concatenation of initial constituents in succession, without any larger-scale grouping of elements. in addition, a large number of themes cannot be understood without reference to rhematic part, which, however, seem more unruly 14 than themes and for this reason have not been the object of detailed study. finally, theme is text-specific. different texts may show different theme patterns. dane model of thematic progression. the notion of thematic progression concerns the ways that texts develop the ideas they present. more specifically thematic progression concerns where themes come fromhow they relate to other themes and rhemes of the text. patterns of thematic progression are formed by a systematic relation between the theme-rheme selections and experiential selections in a text. dane (quoted in fries1995) describes three typical thematic progressions, as shown in figure 4. 1.linear thematic progression: the content of the theme of a second sentence derives from the content of the previous rheme. 2.theme iteration (or progression with constant theme): the same theme enters into relation with a number of different rhemes. 3.progression with derived themes: the particular themes are derived from a hypertheme. 1. t1 r1 t2 (=r1) r2 t3 (=r2) r3 2. t1 r1 t1 r2 t1 r3 3. t t1 r1 t2 r2 t3 r3 figure 4 three patterns of thematic progression 15 according to goutsos(1997), this outline of types of progression suggests a more complicated picture than the simple concatenation of initial elements and, has been widely followed in the literature. dane himself assigns progression to a level of underlying realizations, which is instantiated by goutsos(1997:15-16) as follow: (6) progression with constant theme 1. the prince of wales is among those who think it is high time they should. 2. last week he addressed british industrialists t r t r (7) linear progression 1 . it is usually easy to agree on a common language for a given discussion with neither party perceiving itself to be at a disadvantage. 3. the notion of perceived disadvantage is very important. t r t r goutsos points out some limitations concerning this model: firstly, there are no operational criteria for what constitutes a link. no justification is given for linking the theme of a sentence to the theme or rheme of the previous sentence rather than some other element elsewhere in the text. it is not argued but taken for granted that thematic development works on a sentence-to- sentence level. furthermore, most analyses in terms of thematic progression work less successfully with larger and more complicated texts than with short and carefully selected ones. as fries (1995) also argues, “it seems unreasonable to expect that every theme of a text, particularly a long text, should fit into a single pattern of thematic progression. most texts achieve several purposes, and one should expect the grammatical structures used in these texts to change as one or another purpose is addressed.” finally, dane model involves a propositional view of topic that, as argued later, 16 is problematic. lautamattis notion of topical subject the basic assumption of lautamatti (1987) is that the subject of an individual sentence is generally the element representing “what the sentence is about”. lautamatti makes a distinction between topical subject and non-topical subject. if a lexical subject as opposed to a mere structural dummy, relates directly to the discourse topic, it is called the topical subject, while subjects that are not directly related to the discourse topic are called non-topical subjects. one example is given to illustrate this distinction: (8) biologists suggest that newborn children are lautamatti (1987) explains that since this sentence comes from a piece of text which has the discourse topic newborn children, the subject of the sub-clause is the topical subject of the sentence, while the subject of the main clause is non-topical. thus, the term topic has not been used in the sense of a topicalized or fronted element. it is referring to the idea relating to discourse topic.