Retrospective turn continuations in Mandarin Chinese conversation

How the status of further talk past the point of a turn's possible completion should he described, and what functions different kinds of turn continuation might serve - these are questions that have engaged many scholars since Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's turn-taking model (1974). In this paper, a general scheme is proposed with which one can tease out four interlocking strands in analyzing different kinds of turn continuation: Syntactic continuity vs. discontinuity, main vs. subordinate intonation, retrospective vs. prospective orientation, and information focus vs. non-focus. These parameters combine to form different configurations and interact in interesting ways, accounting for different kinds of turn continuation. The scheme is tested on, and illustrated with, a body of naturally occurring conversational data in Chinese.published_or_final_versio

The interviewer's self-disclosure in L2 research interviews : a conversational analytic study on empathic reformulation and discursive identity work embedded in the interviewer's self-revealing talk

PhD ThesisThis PhD study applies conversation analysis (CA) to the examination of L2 research interview interaction. More specifically, it provides a fine detailed investigation of the interviewer’s self-disclosure in qualitative interviews with L2 immigrants, thereby shedding light on the main research question: “How does the interviewer’s self-disclosure play a part in the interview process?” This thesis particularly focuses on presenting and discussing how the interviewer’s self-disclosure turns are formulated and how such formulation reveals the interviewer’s orientation to the interviewees’ prior talk. Self-disclosure here denotes the interactional moments when the interviewer reveals personal information about herself (e.g. her experiences and opinions in relation to the ongoing talk), although such tellings were not prompted or requested by the interviewees. Thousands of research literature on self-disclosure has been published in the field of social psychology for several decades; however, their approach to, analyses of the topic remained rather rudimentary and uncritical. That is, self-disclosure was readily operationalised as a mere variable (i.e. independent variable or dependent variable) or a pre-given category (e.g. personality trait, cognitive state and so forth) in the studies, under the employment of quantitative methods such as questionnaires and experiments (Antaki et al., 2005). By critically engaging with such treatment in traditional psychology literature, a few interactional studies, drawing on CA and discursive psychology (DP), have examined how actual people design their talk to come off as self-disclosive action, and what kind of interactional consequences that self-disclosure brings in a range of different interactional environments (i.e. Abell et al., 2006; Antaki et al., 2005; Childs & Walsh, 2017; Leudar et al., 2006; Stokoe, 2009). Indeed, the studies have provide insightful examples relating to ‘how self-disclosure is treated as something produced in a particular interactional context, and how it is designed to handle a particular interactional contingency’ (Stokoe, 2009: 157). The current study also aligns with the approach of the aforementioned CA/DP studies, by illuminating how the interviewer’s self-revealing talk is formatted and operated as a socially ii situated practice. In doing this, a total of 64 self-disclosure cases were identified in the corpus composed of approximately ten hours of research interviews with ten marriage immigrant participants. Subsequently, the recognised instances of the video recording were transcribed and analysed by CA. The selected sequences including the interviewer (IR)’s self-disclosure (SD) are discussed in this thesis with three analytic foci: 1) the IR’s SD prefaced with a turn initial, I also; 2) the IR’s SD as a part of assisting the interviewees’ formulation; 3) the IR’s SD as a second story in reponse to the interviewee’s first story. The CA analyses of the phenomenon demonstrate that the IR’s SD turns have three broader interactional functions, namely: 1) empathic reformulation of the interviewees’ preceding turns; 2) pre-emptive formulation of the interviewee’s inarticulate or unspecific utterances; 3) discursive identity work highlighting the common experiential ground between the speakers through shared identities (e.g. L2 speaker, foreigner, learner and employee). Such functions provide interactionally grounded evidence of how the interviewer attempts to build rapport in situ by orienting to several different types of formulation and identities. Such findings from this study not only show how building rapport is made visible in interview interactions, but also present how the interviewer utilises identity as an interactional resource to demonstrate intersubjective understanding and affiliation work. The aforementioned findings addresses an important methodological implication in relation to the importance of ‘researcher reflexivity’. (Mann, 2016; Mann and Walsh, 2013; Roulston, 2010a; Roulston, 2016). In particular, examples and discussion points from this study will highlight how CA transcripts and analyses of the interviewer’s own talk enables novice interviewers’ to notice ‘small-scale but potentially significant elements of the interaction’ (Mann, 2016: 260), how such smaller features can be developed as a topic of analysis providing methodological insights. Most importantly, the findings open up fruitful discussion on how to empirically validate the previous methodological literature’s prescriptions on what to do (e.g. building rapport with interviewees) by employing micro-analytic and reflective practices to focus on how you have done

Co-authorship of Joint utterances in Japanese

The paper introduces a type of joint utterance construction in Japanese, in which two independent sentential-level units are amalgamated, which has hitherto received little attention in the literature. Unlike traditional joint utterance construction where one speaker maintains authority over the syntactic structure of the forthcoming continuation and the other accedes to this, thereby constituting a single TCU (turn constructional unit), our examples demonstrate that both speakers can have authority over the syntactic design of joint utterances. We call such collaborative utterances ‘co-authored joint utterances’ in this paper.The uniqueness of co-authored joint utterances lies in their syntactic architecture. While syntactic and semantic continuity are successfully achieved in constructing co-authored joint utterances, they represent a co-joined structure in which two sentential-level units are involved with their shared part constituting a point of amalgamation, and because of this, the structure of a co-authored joint utterance can no longer be parsed with extant grammar.In analysing co-authored joint utterances, we examine how they can be treated in relation to the distinction between TCU (Turn Constructional Unit) continuation and new TCUs. Due to the particularities of the syntactic architecture of co-authored joint utterances, their existence raises questions about the way in which this distinction is currently operationalised, because despite being syntactically an incremental continuation, and so seemingly a TCU continuation, the co-authored joint utterance implements an action beyond what was initially instantiated by the antecedent of that joint utterance, and so arguably constitutes a new TCU

A conversation-analytic study of word searches in EFL classrooms

PhD ThesisUsing a conversation analytic methodology, this PhD thesis describes and analyses an interactional practice called “word search” in adult Taiwanese EFL classrooms. Word searches are launched when speakers have problems in producing a linguistic item to continue their talk, which may be completed by speakers themselves or another participant. This study focuses on the instances where a word search is interactionally resolved by the participants. More specifically, it examines how EFL learners resolve their word finding troubles with the assistance of other participants (their teacher or fellow learners) in the classroom. The research draws upon transcriptions of 15 hours of video and/or audio recordings of teacher-fronted EFL classrooms in Taiwan. The corpus yielded 62 word search instances where a learner’s word search is interactionally resolved. The findings show that the accomplishment of a word search is through the participants’ coordination with each other’s action, demonstrating that a word search is a social activity and is collaborative in nature. The findings also suggest that despite their possible limited linguistic competence, the EFL learners are social and interactional competent individuals who are able to make use of various interactional strategies and resources to co-resolve the communication breakdown with their teacher or fellow learners. The findings also reveal that participants in the EFL classrooms use word search mainly as an interactional resource to facilitate talk. But at times, it is observed that word searches develop into explicit pedagogical discourse where the teachers and learners are engaged in teaching and learning the searched-for-word. The explicit orientation to learning is also observed when the learners continue eliciting teachers’ confirmation on the correctness of their own candidate items to the search. Finally, the data show that the teacher can play a key role in assisting the learner’s word search by closely monitoring its progress and actively eliciting more clues about the target lexical item

Characterizing and recognizing spoken corrections in human-computer dialog

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1998.Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-106).Miscommunication in human-computer spoken language systems is unavoidable. Recognition failures on the part of the system necessitate frequent correction attempts by the user. Unfortunately and counterintuitively, users' attempts to speak more clearly in the face of recognition errors actually lead to decreased recognition accuracy. The difficulty of correcting these errors, in turn, leads to user frustration and poor assessments of system quality. Most current approaches to identifying corrections rely on detecting violations of task or belief models that are ineffective where such constraints are weak and recognition results inaccurate or unavailable. In contrast, the approach pursued in this thesis, in contrast, uses the acoustic contrasts between original inputs and repeat corrections to identify corrections in a more content- and context-independent fashion. This thesis quantifies and builds upon the observation that suprasegmental features, such as duration, pause, and pitch, play a crucial role in distinguishing corrections from other forms of input to spoken language systems. These features can also be used to identify spoken corrections and explain reductions in recognition accuracy for these utterances. By providing a detailed characterization of acoustic-prosodic changes in corrections relative to original inputs in a voice-only system, this thesis contributes to natural language processing and spoken language understanding. We present a treatment of systematic acoustic variability in speech recognizer input as a source of new information, to interpret the speaker's corrective intent, rather than simply as noise or user error. We demonstrate the application of a machine-learning technique, decision trees, for identifying spoken corrections and achieve accuracy rates close to human levels of performance for corrections of misrecognition errors, using acoustic-prosodic information. This process is simple and local and depends neither on perfect transcription of the recognition string nor complex reasoning based on the full conversation. We further extend the conventional analysis of speaking styles beyond a 'read' versus 'conversational' contrast to extreme clear speech, describing divergence from phonological and durational models for words in this style.by Gina-Anne Levow.Ph.D

Sound Patterns in Mandarin Recycling Repair

The objective of the present research is to investigate the ways in which Mandarin interlocutors utilize prosodic resources as part of the means to achieve interactional actions and sequential-organization in natural conversation. By approaches of interactional prosody and conversational phonetics toward the analysis of sound realization of Mandarin repair in natural conversation, this study provides a preliminary exploration on how the combination of detailed prosodic features forms various sound patterns in reflecting the interactional aspect and sequential organization of Mandarin conversation. The current study examines the particular example of recycling repair, defined as “a repeat of part of a conversational turn,” among all methods used in accomplishing Mandarin same-turn self-repair. The data corpus consists of 260 cases of recycling repair culled from a collection of both video- and audio-taped naturally occurring Mandarin conversation. For each recycling, acoustic measurements, including duration, pitch, silence, cut-off and lengthening were carried out by using Praat. Additional judgments would be made based on the analyst’s impressionistic interpretation of these acoustic cues. After taking measurements, the results were compared and the sound patterns that emerged from recyclings of the same sound manifestation were identified. By a qualitative case-study methodology, this thesis reports 6 sound patterns and 3 sub-patterns based on 112 cases of Mandarin recyclings selected. The findings from the current research highlight the interaction-specific, sequence-specific, and function-specific examples of recyclings in relation to the use of the 6 main prosodic patterns. 3 sub-patterns that share some similarity with 2 of the 6 sound patterns in terms of interactional function were further identified. The result from the current exploratory work on the correlation between sound patterns in Mandarin recyclings and interaction contributes significantly to an interdisciplinary study that focuses on broadening the interactional linguistic theory by paying close attention to the sound patterns in natural conversation

Lahktarindid suulises eesti keeles: uurimus infostruktuuri raamistikus

Käesolev doktoriväitekiri „Initial and final detachments in spoken Estonian: a study in the framework of Information Structuring“ käsitleb lahktarindeid eesti suulises keeles infostruktuuri raamistikus. Lahktarinditena (inglise keeles detachments, dislocations) vaadeldakse siin konstruktsioone, milles leksikaalne element esineb kas enne pealauset või pärast seda, kusjuures pealauses esineb leksikaalse elemendiga samaviiteline asesõna. Neid konstruktsioone peetakse spontaanses keelekasutuses universaalseteks, kuid nende esinemus ja funktsioonid on keeleti mõnevõrra erinevad. Lahktarindeid ei ole eesti keeles varem uuritud; üldiselt on neid keeleuurimustes seotud infostruktuuri mõistetega nagu teema ja postreema, st nad tõstavad esile infostruktuuri tasandil leksikaalses üksuses ühelt poolt teema, mille kohta pealauses (reema) midagi öeldakse ning teiselt poolt esinevad nad struktuurides, kus pealause ehk reema on lausungis esimesel kohal, millele järgneb leksikaalse üksusena postreema. Et infostruktuuri tasandist lähtuvaid uurimusi eesti keele kohta tehtud pole, antakse väitekirja esimestes peatükkides ülevaade valdkonna problemaatikast ning käesolevas töös olulistest lähenemistest. Väitekiri sisaldab ka ülevaadet enamikust (süntaksit käsitlevatest) uurimustest eesti keele kohta, milles kasutatakse infostruktuuri mõisteid. Korpuseanalüüsis vaadeldakse lähemalt ülalmainitud kaht tüüpi lahktarindeid, keskendudes peamiselt referendi informatsioonilisele staatusele, tarindite erinevatele funktsioonidele ja toimimisele diskursuse tasandil. Väitekirja tulemusena võib lahktarindite kohta väita järgmist: tegemist on suulises kõnes levinud struktuuridega, mis toetavad suulisele kõnele iseloomulikku info edastamist lühemate üksuste kaupa. Tarindites viidatavad referendid on enamasti kas vestluses juba esinenud või on tuletatavad vestluse üldisest raamistikust. Postreemat sisaldavates tarindites, kus leksikaalne referent tuleb alles lausungi lõpus, esineb rohkem ka eelneva sisuga seostamata referente. Lisaks vormilistele erinevustele ning nendest tulenevalt on nende kahe struktuuri puhul selgelt näha erinevaid strateegiaid referendi sissetoomise puhul ning selle käsitlemisel edaspidises diskursuses.The present thesis “Initial and final detachments in spoken Estonian: a study in the framework of Information Structuring” analyses detachment constructions (initial and final detachments) in spoken Estonian, in the framework of Information Structuring. Initial detachments are defined as structures where a detached lexical element precedes the main clause, which contains a coreferential pronoun; in final detachments, the referent is at first referred to by a pronoun in the main clause, followed by the lexical element in a detached element at the end of the utterance. These structures have been considered universals in spontaneous oral language, but their functions and degree of grammaticalization differ in various languages. Detached constructions have not been investigated before in Estonian. They have been associated to the notions of Theme and Post-rheme at the level of Information Structuring, i.e. initial detachment introduces an element that is considered as Theme at the informational level and final detachment serves to introduce the Post-rheme. Given that there are no studies dedicated to the level of Information Structuring as independent object of investigation, an overview about the main problems of this domain is provided in first chapters of the thesis, followed by a summary of studies (in syntax) about Estonian where the notions of Information Structuring framework have been used. The analysis of the corpus concentrates mainly on the informational status of the referent, different functions of these constructions and their functioning at the discourse level. The analysis revealed that detached constructions allow the information to be staged during the discourse building work; as concerns the informational status of the referents, it could be shown that they have mostly been mentioned before during the conversation or are present in the thematic frame of the discourse. Final detachments are also used in order to introduce unmentioned and new referents. Besides the formal differences, and stemming from them, the two constructions are clearly different as concerns the mechanisms of introduction of the referent and its treatment in the discourse

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)