Title: A Conversation Analysis of the Advice Elicitation on the Counseling Phone-ins of Marital Contradiction from the Perspective of Epistemics

Abstract: Epistemics is a hot theory used in the current western conversation analysis, but conversation analysts seldom carry out comprehensive and systematic analysis of advice elicitation from the perspective of epistemics. This study gives a comprehensive epistemic interpretation of advice elicitation on Chinese phone-ins of marital contradiction by means of conversation analysis, and reveals the types of epistemic status relation positioning embodied in advice elicitation and the epistemic stances for and the essence of these types of positioning. It is found that the advice elicitation reflects two types of epistemic status relation positioning implemented by callers and hosts respectively, that the two types of positioning can be displayed by five kinds of epistemic stances, and that the essence of positioning is to construct two types of knowledge distribution relation between the two interactants. This study can expand the theoretical perspective of advice elicitation research and promote the development of epistemics; it can also provide enlightenment for the effective implementation of advice interaction on phone-ins of marital contradiction.

Keywords: counseling phone-in, advice elicitation, epistemics, epistemic status, asymmetric relation

Author: Zhuo Peng, Associate Professor, School of Foreign Studies, Shaoguan University, Shaoguan, Guangdong, China.