Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Maps
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Part I Introduction
- Part II Lexicon
- Part III Grammatical foundations
- Part IV Major clause types
- Part V Clause linkage
- Part VI Pragmatics (language usage)
- 19 Speech acts
- 20 Politeness and honorifics I
- 21 Politeness and honorifics II
- 22 Speech style shift
- 23 Sentence-final particles
- 24 Modality and evidentiality
- 25 Backchanneling
- 26 Demonstratives
- 27 Represented speech
- 28 Gendered language
- References
- Index
25 - Backchanneling
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Maps
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Part I Introduction
- Part II Lexicon
- Part III Grammatical foundations
- Part IV Major clause types
- Part V Clause linkage
- Part VI Pragmatics (language usage)
- 19 Speech acts
- 20 Politeness and honorifics I
- 21 Politeness and honorifics II
- 22 Speech style shift
- 23 Sentence-final particles
- 24 Modality and evidentiality
- 25 Backchanneling
- 26 Demonstratives
- 27 Represented speech
- 28 Gendered language
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The roles of speaker and listener constantly alternate in typical conversation. Person A is the speaker in a given moment, with B as the listener; then B takes his/her turn to speak, while A becomes the listener. Goffman (1974: 136) characterizes this state of affairs as follows.
Talk is socially organized, not merely in terms of who speaks to whom in what language, but as a little system of mutually ratified and ritually governed face-to-face action, a social encounter. Once a state of talk has been ratified, cues must be available for requesting the floor and giving it up, for informing the speaker as to the stability of the focus of attention he is receiving. Intimate collaboration must be sustained to ensure that one turn at talking neither overlaps the previous one too much, nor wants for inoffensive conversational supply, for someone’s turn must always and exclusively be in progress.
In both English-speaking societies and Japan, possibly worldwide, the conversational norm consists of one person speaking at a time, with the speaker changing in an orderly manner. If someone starts speaking while you are talking, you are likely to be offended. By contrast, if a speaker ends his/her utterance and a dead silence follows, it might be embarrassing to those present as most people feel a need to avoid silences during conversations. These tacit rules of conversation are studied in linguistics and other academic disciplines in terms of taking the floor (i.e. the right to speak in interaction) or turn-taking. For such investigation, Sacks et al. (1974) developed an analytical framework, conversation analysis, which has been widely used for describing the orderliness and sequential patterns of verbal interaction.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- JapaneseA Linguistic Introduction, pp. 319 - 330Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014