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Managing common ground with listener responses in foreign-language business telephone calls

Managing common ground with listener responses in foreign-language business telephone calls. Gisela Redeker University of Groningen 8 th IPrA Conference, Toronto, July 2003. Outline. Managing Common Ground: Grounding Response Tokens Examples from business phone call Conclusions.

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Managing common ground with listener responses in foreign-language business telephone calls

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  1. Managing common groundwith listener responsesin foreign-language business telephone calls Gisela RedekerUniversity of Groningen 8th IPrA Conference, Toronto, July 2003

  2. Outline • Managing Common Ground: Grounding • Response Tokens • Examples from business phone call • Conclusions

  3. Grounding Grounding: managing (and building) common ground in interaction Common ground: mutually shared beliefs - Heuristics: co-presence, community Signaling: nonverbal, intonational, lexical, grammatical

  4. Response Tokens Definition (adapted from Gardner 2001): Response tokens are conversational objects that indicate that a piece of talk has been registered by the recipient of that talk, claiming that the talk has been heard, acknowledged, and perhaps understood, assessed, or agreed with, or treated as news or not news.

  5. Functions of Response Tokens Assertions of understanding • continuer mm hm, uh huh • acknowledgement yeah, mm • news oh • ‘change-of-activity’ token okay Displays of understanding • agreement, confirmation yes, yeah, okay, mhm • disagreement, denial no

  6. Fragment 1 off-record disagreement P: silence and minimal response M: silence, hesitations, hedging P is forcing M to take responsibility

  7. Fragment 2 fine-tuning an arrangement P: minimal acknowledgements, hesitant/partial agreements, request specification, state constraint M: amend and elaborate proposal acknowledge constraint (news receipt)

  8. Conclusions • Response tokens achieve interactional alignment by asserting or displaying understanding. • In negotiations, satisfactory grounding often requires sequences with several responses, esp. when common ground and means of grounding are restricted.

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