Other-initiated repair across languages: Towards a typology of conversational structures

This special issue reports on a cross-linguistic study of other-initiated repair, a domain at the crossroads of language, mind, and social life. Other-initiated repair is part of a system of practices that people use to deal with problems of speaking, hearing and understanding. The contributions in this special issue describe the linguistic resources and interactional practices associated with other-initiated repair in ten different languages. Here we provide an overview of the research methods and the conceptual framework. The empirical base for the project consists of corpora of naturally occurring conversations, collected in fieldsites around the world. Methodologically, we combine qualitative analysis with a comparative-typological perspective, and we formulate principles for the cross-linguistic comparison of conversational structures. A key move, of broad relevance to pragmatic typology, is the recognition that formats for repair initiation form paradigm-like systems that are ultimately language-specific, and that comparison is best done at the level of the constitutive properties of these formats. These properties can be functional (concerning aspects of linguistic formatting) as well as sequential (concerning aspects of the interactional environment). We show how functional and sequential aspects of conversational structure can capture patterns of commonality and diversity in conversational structures within and across language

The Development of Pragmatic Competence through Telecollaboration: An Analysis of Requesting Behavior

Telecollaboration is a pedagogical approach in which geographically distant parties work together for the purposes of culture and language learning. A growing body of literature documents the benefits of telecollaboration for the foreign language classroom, specifically in the area of interlanguage pragmatic development. While peer-peer telecollaborative studies are well represented in this strand of research, there has been a lack of attention to novice-expert telecollaboration, a gap this dissertation seeks to fill. The study investigated the requesting behavior of American learners of German for Professional Purposes (`novices') as they interacted via synchronous Web conferences with German-speaking professionals in Germany (`experts'). Requesting behavior was examined through four focal areas: directness, internal modification, external modification, and appropriateness. In addition to comparing the requesting behavior of novices and experts, the study also examined the effect of interaction with experts and data-driven focused instruction on the development of novices' requesting behavior. The research used a mixed methodology of quantitative and qualitative analytic approaches to evaluate transcribed and coded request sequences. The two groups showed a number of differences: novice speakers used more direct requests than experts, experts used more internal modification than novices, and experts were rated as more appropriate than novices. This result broadly corresponds to previous research findings. In contrast to earlier findings, the two groups showed similarities in their use of external modifiers, including both the frequency and range of use. Novice development was not evident from quantitative analysis, but qualitative analysis revealed individual differences among the learners profiled, including the emergence of an unexpected category of request modification: the modified external support move. Although certain learners were seen to exhibit pragmatic development, other learners showed the opposite trend, namely an overreliance on formulaic language use. In addition to supporting previous research findings about the nature of request production in second language learners, the study confirms the utility of explicit instruction in pragmatic development occurring within a telecollaborative context. It further contributes new understanding to the field of second language acquisition by identifying the limits of existing coding taxonomies for speech act research, and it suggests the need to develop better tools for quantitative research of interlanguage pragmatic development

Cracks in the glass ceiling?: laughter and politics in Broadcast News Interviews and the gendered nature of media representations

"This dissertation investigates politicians' laughter in televised Broadcast News Interviews (BNIs) and mass media representations of Hillary Rodham Clinton's laughter in the context of her failed bid for the Democratic nomination in the United States in 2007-2008. The data for this study comprise spoken, interactional data (corpora of televised BNIs) and written, representational data (a corpus of media discourse)--distinct forms that require the use of different theoretical and methodological apparatus. The first component of the analysis employs the methodological framework of Conversation Analysis to examine the interactional work accomplished by Clinton's laughter and that of other politicians in situ, that is, in the BNIs themselves. The second component of the analysis employs an intertextual approach to analyze the post-hoc recontextualization of Clinton's laughter by the mainstream media as a gendered representation, namely, as a ""cackle"". In analyzing Clinton's laughter in talk-in-interaction and its subsequent representation in talk-out-of interaction, this study makes a distinctive contribution to a central question in studies of language, gender and sexuality-when gender can or should be invoked as an explanatory category in the analysis of discourse. The first two empirical chapters presents an interactional analysis of politicians' and Clinton's laughter in BNIs, and reveals how the previously undescribed practice of laughing in the course of ""serious"" interviewer questions, or at their completion, is not something that is unique to Clinton but is in fact a generic interactional practice. Further, this practice is not something that is oriented to as gendered by any of the participants in the news interviews analyzed. However, the intertextual analysis developed in the third empirical chapter suggests that this practice became gendered in post-hoc recontextualizations of those interactions, that is, in subsequent media representations- of Clinton's laughter. By considering the way Clinton's laughter travelled across contexts and into other discursive spaces, this dissertation shows how, despite women and men behaving in similar (non-gendered) ways, Clinton's behaviour was taken up in gendered (arguably, misogynist) ways. As a result, this dissertation gives empirical substance to claims about the ""double-bind"" situation that women politicians still face in the public sphere of politics.

Paths through meaning and form: Festschrift offered to Klaus von Heusinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday

“Paths through meaning and form. Festschrift offered to Klaus von Heusinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday” umfasst 60 Beiträge von Kolleginnen und Kollegen, die mit Klaus von Heusinger in seiner wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn zusammengearbeitet haben. Die in den einzelnen Beiträgen behandelten Themen gehen auf Prominenz, Referentialität, Quantifikation, Kasus, Spracherwerb und experimentelle Psycholinguistik ein

Accessing spoken interaction through dialogue processing [online]

Zusammenfassung Unser Leben, unsere Leistungen und unsere Umgebung, alles wird derzeit durch Schriftsprache dokumentiert. Die rasante Fortentwicklung der technischen Möglichkeiten Audio, Bilder und Video aufzunehmen, abzuspeichern und wiederzugeben kann genutzt werden um die schriftliche Dokumentation von menschlicher Kommunikation, zum Beispiel Meetings, zu unterstützen, zu ergänzen oder gar zu ersetzen. Diese neuen Technologien können uns in die Lage versetzen Information aufzunehmen, die anderweitig verloren gehen, die Kosten der Dokumentation zu senken und hochwertige Dokumente mit audiovisuellem Material anzureichern. Die Indizierung solcher Aufnahmen stellt die Kerntechnologie dar um dieses Potential auszuschöpfen. Diese Arbeit stellt effektive Alternativen zu schlüsselwortbasierten Indizes vor, die Suchraumeinschränkungen bewirken und teilweise mit einfachen Mitteln zu berechnen sind. Die Indizierung von Sprachdokumenten kann auf verschiedenen Ebenen erfolgen: Ein Dokument gehört stilistisch einer bestimmten Datenbasis an, welche durch sehr einfache Merkmale bei hoher Genauigkeit automatisch bestimmt werden kann. Durch diese Art von Klassifikation kann eine Reduktion des Suchraumes um einen Faktor der Größenordnung 4­10 erfolgen. Die Anwendung von thematischen Merkmalen zur Textklassifikation bei einer Nachrichtendatenbank resultiert in einer Reduktion um einen Faktor 18. Da Sprachdokumente sehr lang sein können müssen sie in thematische Segmente unterteilt werden. Ein neuer probabilistischer Ansatz sowie neue Merkmale (Sprecherinitia­ tive und Stil) liefern vergleichbare oder bessere Resultate als traditionelle schlüsselwortbasierte Ansätze. Diese thematische Segmente können durch die vorherrschende Aktivität charakterisiert werden (erzählen, diskutieren, planen, ...), die durch ein neuronales Netz detektiert werden kann. Die Detektionsraten sind allerdings begrenzt da auch Menschen diese Aktivitäten nur ungenau bestimmen. Eine maximale Reduktion des Suchraumes um den Faktor 6 ist bei den verwendeten Daten theoretisch möglich. Eine thematische Klassifikation dieser Segmente wurde ebenfalls auf einer Datenbasis durchgeführt, die Detektionsraten für diesen Index sind jedoch gering. Auf der Ebene der einzelnen Äußerungen können Dialogakte wie Aussagen, Fragen, Rückmeldungen (aha, ach ja, echt?, ...) usw. mit einem diskriminativ trainierten Hidden Markov Model erkannt werden. Dieses Verfahren kann um die Erkennung von kurzen Folgen wie Frage/Antwort­Spielen erweitert werden (Dialogspiele). Dialogakte und ­spiele können eingesetzt werden um Klassifikatoren für globale Sprechstile zu bauen. Ebenso könnte ein Benutzer sich an eine bestimmte Dialogaktsequenz erinnern und versuchen, diese in einer grafischen Repräsentation wiederzufinden. In einer Studie mit sehr pessimistischen Annahmen konnten Benutzer eines aus vier ähnlichen und gleichwahrscheinlichen Gesprächen mit einer Genauigkeit von ~ 43% durch eine graphische Repräsentation von Aktivität bestimmt. Dialogakte könnte in diesem Szenario ebenso nützlich sein, die Benutzerstudie konnte aufgrund der geringen Datenmenge darüber keinen endgültigen Aufschluß geben. Die Studie konnte allerdings für detailierte Basismerkmale wie Formalität und Sprecheridentität keinen Effekt zeigen. Abstract Written language is one of our primary means for documenting our lives, achievements, and environment. Our capabilities to record, store and retrieve audio, still pictures, and video are undergoing a revolution and may support, supplement or even replace written documentation. This technology enables us to record information that would otherwise be lost, lower the cost of documentation and enhance high­quality documents with original audiovisual material. The indexing of the audio material is the key technology to realize those benefits. This work presents effective alternatives to keyword based indices which restrict the search space and may in part be calculated with very limited resources. Indexing speech documents can be done at a various levels: Stylistically a document belongs to a certain database which can be determined automatically with high accuracy using very simple features. The resulting factor in search space reduction is in the order of 4­10 while topic classification yielded a factor of 18 in a news domain. Since documents can be very long they need to be segmented into topical regions. A new probabilistic segmentation framework as well as new features (speaker initiative and style) prove to be very effective compared to traditional keyword based methods. At the topical segment level activities (storytelling, discussing, planning, ...) can be detected using a machine learning approach with limited accuracy; however even human annotators do not annotate them very reliably. A maximum search space reduction factor of 6 is theoretically possible on the databases used. A topical classification of these regions has been attempted on one database, the detection accuracy for that index, however, was very low. At the utterance level dialogue acts such as statements, questions, backchannels (aha, yeah, ...), etc. are being recognized using a novel discriminatively trained HMM procedure. The procedure can be extended to recognize short sequences such as question/answer pairs, so called dialogue games. Dialog acts and games are useful for building classifiers for speaking style. Similarily a user may remember a certain dialog act sequence and may search for it in a graphical representation. In a study with very pessimistic assumptions users are able to pick one out of four similar and equiprobable meetings correctly with an accuracy ~ 43% using graphical activity information. Dialogue acts may be useful in this situation as well but the sample size did not allow to draw final conclusions. However the user study fails to show any effect for detailed basic features such as formality or speaker identity

Order and structure in syntax I

This book reconsiders the role of order and structure in syntax, focusing on fundamental issues such as word order and grammatical functions. The first group of papers in the collection asks what word order can tell us about syntactic structure, using evidence from V2, object shift, word order gaps and different kinds of movement. The second group of papers all address the issue of subjecthood in some way, and examine how certain subject properties vary across languages: expression of subjects, expletive subjects, quirky and locative subjects. All of the papers address in some way the tension between modelling what can vary across languages whilst improving our understanding of what might be universal to human language

Problems connected with the notion of implicature

As the title suggests, the primary concern of this study is with problems arising from a very widely used notion in the recent literature of linguistics and philosophy, the notion of implicature. As this concept was introduced and developed by the philosopher H. P. Grice, the main part of the study will understandably be centred around his work. Grice distinguished between two main types of implicature, the conventional and the conversational. In the first part we will be concerned with, what Grice called, conventional implicature, and in particular with the linguistic items generating it, as described in his work. Thus the aim of this part of the study will be to investigate the nature of conventional implicata, and to ask whether they can be justifiably claimed to be nonconsequential for truth-evaluation and invariable, as Grice argues. Grice's account in this respect will be found to be partly implausible, as regards his treatment of 'therefore', and partly inadequate, as it fails to take into account the wide ranging function of 'but' - his paradigm of conventional implicature - but treats its variable meaning aspects as invariable, conventional implicature. In view of the intriguing linguistic behaviour of 'but', the main contributions to this topic in the literature will be reviewed. In the second part of the study our primary aim will be to consider in detail linguistic phenomena that come under the rubric of conversational implicature in the literature - with an emphasis on Grice's examples - with a view to detecting common characteristics that can be taken as the parameters along which these phenomena can be defined as a homogeneous class. It will be concluded that they cannot. More stringent criteria will be proposed for membership in a narrowly defined class of conversational implicature. Two classes of background knowledge and assumptions will be described and shown to bear significantly on language production and understanding and, in particular, on the production and understanding of linguistic facts that have been called conversational implicatures. It will be concluded that the term 'conversational implicature' has been misused and abused. The view taken here will be that background knowledge schemes must be taken into account and represented in a language theory, though the difficulties facing such an enterprise are well understood and acknowledged. However, the overall conclusion will be that Grice's proposal effects a cut and dried demarcation between a neat but narrowly defined truth-functional semantics, on the one hand, and an unexplicated pragmatics, on the other, that would, however, include the most intriguing aspects of language use. , This view of language is not very revealing and, hence, uninteresting and unappealing

-ish / Ish: Aspects of a suffix turned free morpheme

The topic of the dissertation is the Germanic morpheme -ish / Ish, which forms adjectives and attaches to a variety of base words in its bound form (-ish). Recently, it has detached from host words, now also occurring as a free morpheme (Ish). The suffix is a cognate to German -isch and is recorded in the English language since Old English. These three aspects of -ish / Ish motivate a tripartite distinction of the thesis which investigates them with respect to the following questions: 1)How did the suffix -ish develop historically and how has its semantics changed to account for its present-day polysemy? 2a.) How has it developed into a free morpheme Ish and how can that development be described? 2b.) What is the status of the independent morpheme? 3a) Which position does the suffix take in a cohort of other adjective-forming English suffixes, and in which respects to the German counterparts of these suffixes differ? Can they be described as rivals? These questions guide the three parts of the thesis and they are based on several basic hypotheses. First, in early work suffixes have been analysed with respect to their function of transposition into other word classes, but recent work has recognised their semantic contribution to their base words. In order to show that suffixes have meaning, a lexical-semantic analysis is conducted which bases the development of the suffix with different bases on a diachronic corpus analysis. The analysis shows how the suffix gradually develops meaning components which explains its present-day polysemy. In doing so, a novel lexical-semantic feature is proposed, which serves to complement and extend work by Lieber (2004, 2007, 2016b). Second, the development of the free morpheme is shown to be gradual by classifying its properties on the basis of a corpus analysis. It has been described in the literature with respect to two opposing processes, grammaticalisation and degrammaticalisation and the present investigation points to the latter. Connected to the process is the question of their status and grammaticalisation is frequently considered the process of emergence of discourse markers. Their properties and functions are contrasted with the comparable elements of hedges and the identified properties of Ish align it more convincingly with the latter. Third, similar adjective-forming suffixes are frequently described as rivals which are in competition with each other and which share a common meaning. I show that the previously identified lexicalsemantic feature can also be felicitously applied to the English and German comparative suffixes, which highlights their subtle meaning differences and which identifies semantic niches for each, despite some overlap. A comparative corpus analysis sheds light on their respective frequencies and distribution

Courtesy markers in requests: The case of pray and please in Late Modern English

This PhD dissertation focuses on the study of the two main courtesy markers in requests in the Late Modern English period, namely please and pray. Both of them are borrowings from French and came to replace native strategies (e.g. the Old English parenthetical ic bidde) in this pragmatic function. Pray had been the major courtesy marker in requests since the Early Modern English period, but it started to fall into disuse during the Late Modern English period, when a new form, please, started to gain ground. A preliminary analysis of the pragmatic markers please and pray in the multigenre corpus ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers) showed that these features are only available in fiction, drama and letters. Following these results, I proceeded to the analysis of several single-genre corpora. As regards fiction, I resorted to a selection from Chadwyck Healey’s Eighteenth-Century Fiction (1700-1780) and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1782-1903). For drama I used the drama section in A Corpus of Irish English. Finally, I paid attention to correspondence, and studied two epistolary corpora covering different periods within Late Modern English (the Corpus of Late Eighteenth-Century Prose (1761-1790) and A Corpus of Late Modern English Prose (1860-1919)) and a selection of letter-writing manuals extracted from ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) database. My study relies on corpus linguistics methodology, and gets insights from Historical Pragmatics, Politeness Theory and Speech-Act Theory, while the origin and development of the courtesy marker please is accounted for in terms of grammaticalisation. The thesis includes a revision of the literature on the different theoretical approaches and provides the accounts and descriptions of these two courtesy markers in the literature, both for Present-day English and for earlier periods. I also looked at Late Modern English reference works in order to gain insight as to how the speech act of requests was apprehended in the period. In my corpus analysis I explore the different sources which have been proposed in the literature as the origin of the courtesy marker please. In addition to conditional structures of the type if you please, in my study I draw special attention to imperative structures such as be pleased to, and please to, which constitute in my opinion the major source of the Present-day courtesy marker please. The process of grammaticalisation of please from these imperative structures would be as follows: Be pleased to > please to > please (verb) > please (courtesy marker). Thus, the courtesy marker please would have originated in a full matrix clause rather than in an already parenthetical conditional form. The grammaticalisation of please follows similar patterns to those identified in the development of other pragmatic markers, not only in English, but also cross-linguistically

Interactional structures and engagement in service encounters: An investigation into communication at the hotel front desk

The main aim of the study was to explore the specifics of communicative behaviour at the hotel reception that establish the institutional character of the interaction to accomplish a service encounter. The hotel provides a unique environment for research related to global communication and questions of politeness usage. Investigating conversations between hotel receptionists and their guests was used to demonstrate how interdisciplinary approaches can further knowledge in a globalised world order. Nine and a half hours of naturally occurring interactions between receptionists and guests were videotaped in four hotels in three European countries (England, Germany and Spain). The analysis was conducted using Conversation Analysis (CA) as the primary method and enriched through the use of ethnographic notes. CA was used to show how normative social structures are invoked in service encounters at the hotel front desk. Ethnographic insights provided additional evidence for how the interactions are anchored in the social reality. The findings suggest that conversations at the front desk are highly structured and possess features similar to institutional and mundane interactions. Conversations were classed into three phases (arrival, stay and departure), each of which has observable and robust interactional features. It is proposed that an effective encounter between hotel guest and receptionist is not solely reliant on a particular structure. Instead, the results indicate that a very specific amount of engagement by both the service provider and the customer is required. Thus, following the tradition of CA, it is demonstrated how precisely participants can organise their talk and behaviour according to a mutual preference of both guest and receptionist. The analysis showed that miscommunication occurs infrequent in these service encounters. Furthermore, intercultural notions are seldom made relevant in talk by participants. The study contributes to knowledge in interactional, service encounter and tourism related literature. The findings also have implications for practitioners in the tourism industry