Giving directives in Cantonese: A case study of a Hong Kong workplace

Abstract

Directives refer to utterances intended to get someone to do something. Although there is a considerable amount of literature on directives in various languages and settings, research focusing on the Hong Kong context and using Cantonese data is still limited. This paper examines how directives are delivered in Cantonese by drawing on audio recorded daily interaction between colleagues in a medical laboratory in Hong Kong. Like many social actions, directives can be realised in a range of linguistic forms. In studies of directives using discourse analytic approaches, the variation in the linguistic form of a directive is often attributed to various contextual factors. Moreover, studies informed by conversation analytic approaches point out that whether an utterance is understood as a particular social action (e.g. giving a directive) is often closely associated with the design of the utterance and its sequential placement in the interaction. This paper follows the conversation analytic approach, and combines it with the framework of community of practice. The analysis focuses on the design of directive utterances and the situational and sequential contexts in which they are issued. Our data shows that imperative seems to be the most frequently used syntactic form for directives in Cantonese, a finding which appears different from the existing literature on workplace directives using English data. A close examination of the turn design and the sequential organisation of the directives shows that the participants tend to use various lexical and discursive strategies to mitigate the potential negative impact of imperative directives. The deployment of these mitigating strategies seems to be associated with two conditions, in addition to other contextual factors: whether the interaction is initiated by the speaker, and whether the reason for initiating the interaction is to issue the directive. The complex relationship between the linguistic form of a directive and its contextual and sequential placement will be discussed in a later part of the presentation.