The study examines romantic confession as a form of deliberate persuasive discourse in which the interlocutors verbally and nonverbally influence each other’s views and behaviors. A complex but yet recurrent pattern distinctive of romantic confession was identified, and, as a result, the study developed a discourse structure for romantic confession to reveal its discourse disposition, communicative function, and the effects of interaction and co-construction between interlocutors. By analyzing in-depth the twenty-hour discourse data collected from the popular Chinese reality dating TV show, Perfect Dating, the present study devised a four-stage discourse structure of romantic confession with concepts drawn from interdisciplinary studies, specifically, narrative studies and communication studies.
Modeling after Labov and Waletzky’s analytic framework for narrative analysis, which allows discussions on the characteristics of the discourse itself (Labov and Waletzky, 1967), the current study created a framework on a conversational level to capture the interactional and communicative characteristics of romantic confession. The stages identified in the discourse of romantic confession are: (1) setting the scene, (2) making impressions & confessing feelings, (3) discussion & negotiation, and (4) coming to a decision. The roles of the interlocutors are found to shift between stages and each of the stages serves different functions in romantic confession. It is also found that despite following a general direction of conversation development, interlocutors will often skip or go back and forth between stages for various communicative and social reasons (stylistic preference, face-mitigation, co-construction, etc.).
The current study is one of the first comprehensive studies to demonstrate the constantly interacting and co-constructing linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors between romantic confessors and confessees. It is the goal of the study to establish a structural framework that provides new insights into the interactionally and socially constructed characteristics of romantic persuasion, as well as to resituate discourse analysis studies in a more functional and communicative light to welcome future discussions across disciplines.
Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. 1967. Narrative analysis. Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts: Proceedings of the 1966 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society, ed. by June Helm, 12 – 44. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
