Zoom webinar by Dr. Wei-Lin Melody Chang, Lecturer in Chinese, School of Languages and Cultures, The University of Queensland, Australia.
Thursday, November 6, 2025
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
Zoom Webinar
This talk explores the application of interactional pragmatics as a methodological framework for examining how speakers of Chinese establish, manage, and negotiate interpersonal relationships across diverse communicative contexts. Interactional pragmatics is a field of linguistics that studies how meaning is created and negotiated between interlocutors. It examines the structural organisation of conversations and focuses on how context, shared knowledge, and social relationships shape the way people interact and understand each other. Drawing on fine-grained analytical approaches, I demonstrate how this methodology enables detailed investigation of interpersonal communication dynamics in various social interactions. The talk focuses specifically on two key contexts in Chinese: first encounters, where unacquainted participants establish relational connections through humour and assessment, and workplace interactions, where ongoing relationship management intersects with transactional goals. Through detailed analysis of authentic interactional data, I illustrate how interactional pragmatics provides valuable insights into the micro-level processes through which individuals construct and negotiate their social relationships, offering a window into the underlying dynamics of Chinese culture.
Wei-Lin Melody Chang is a Lecturer in Chinese in the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland. Her research focuses on pragmatics, intercultural communication and business negotiation, especially studying face, (im)politeness and humour. She is author of Face and face practices in Chinese talk-in-interactions: An empirical analysis of business interactions in Taiwan (2016, Equinox), as well as a number of papers in edited volumes and journals, including the Journal of Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, Journal of Politeness Research, Pragmatics, Multilingua, Lingua, and East Asian Pragmatics.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies