Achieving Communicative Purposes : A Cross-Linguistic and Corpus-Based Analysis of British and Chinese Conversations

Zhou, Lily and McEnery, Tony (2026) Achieving Communicative Purposes : A Cross-Linguistic and Corpus-Based Analysis of British and Chinese Conversations. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates how whole conversations are organised to achieve communicative purposes, and how these purposes are realised lexically, grammatically and pragmatically in conversations in Mandarin Chinese, British English, and English spoken by Chinese learners of English. Existing approaches to conversations have often focused on utterance-level units or on short sequences. They do not examine how conversations are organised through functionally defined units across entire conversations, nor do they provide classifications for annotating the communicative purposes achieved within these units. To address this gap, this thesis draws on Egbert et al.’s framework to segment conversational discourse into discourse units (DUs) and annotate them with communicative purposes. This framework is applied to three corpora, all based round the Graded Examinations in Spoken English (GESE): a Mandarin Chinese conversation corpus compiled for this study, a corpus of L1 British English speakers undertaking the same examination, and a subset of the Trinity Lancaster Corpus comprising interactions between British English examiners and Chinese learners of English. Across the three corpora, patterns of DU usage were examined, and lexical items associated with specific communicative purposes were identified and examined in context to explore their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic realisation at both micro and macro-discoursal levels. The comparative analysis reveals systematic similarities and differences in how communicative purposes are organised and realised across Mandarin Chinese, British English, and Chinese learners’ English. In particular, the findings show that some communicative purposes and lexical choices in L2 English conversations reflect influence from L1 Mandarin, resulting in patterns that differ from those observed in L1 British English. This thesis contributes to understanding how communicative purposes are realised in Mandarin Chinese and British English, demonstrates the value of DU-based analysis for examining conversation organisation across languages, and offers insights into language assessment research as well as English teaching and learning.