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Book: Chinese Discourse and Interaction

Chapter: 10. Customer–employee interaction from a diachronic perspective

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.20073

Blurb:

Approaching discourse analysis from a diachronic perspective, the research described in this chapter examines Chinese telephone interactions between customer callers and employee recipients. Built on the author’s previous research (Sun 1998, 2004, 2008), the current study compares data obtained recently with a comparable set collected over a decade ago, aiming to identify and characterise shifts and changes in business employees’ discourse as observed recently in customer-employee telephone discourse interactions in mainland China. This situated discourse analysis contributes to the fields of discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and cross-cultural studies in that it provides an up-to-date, detailed account of Chinese discourse interactions based on customer-employee telephone interactions.

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