Advice-giving in Mandarin conversation is conducted through various syntactic forms. In this article, we explore several syntactic forms the speakers usually employ when doing advice-giving. An initial examination showed a difference in the distribution of advice-giving made through these practices. They are sequentially-specific syntactic forms of advice-giving and they are sensitive to the sequential environment. Further exploration on this distributional pattern suggested that the advice forms speakers selected display their evaluation of the sequential environment or interactional situation and it is closely related to the speaker’s orientation to deontic rights to give advice on a particular sequential position.
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