Little Words That Matter: Discourse Markers “So” and “Oh” and the Doing of Other-Attentiveness in Social Interaction

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of actual, recorded social interactions between close familiars with the goal to describe discursive practices involved in showing engagement with the other party, or other‐attentiveness. Focusing on the deployment of the discourse markers “so” and “oh” in utterances that launch new conversational topics, the article demonstrates that “so” overwhelmingly prefaces other‐attentive topics, whereas “oh” prefaces self‐attentive topics. We consider the interactional implications of this distribution and how the basic meanings of these linguistic objects are employed in the service of communicating interpersonal involvement.

“So What's Up?”: Using the Discourse MarkerSoto Launch Conversational Business

“…Johnson (2002) described the use of so for prefacing questions in police interviews and argued that it is used to focus the participants' attention on the interview's agenda. Most recently, Bolden (2006) argued that, when introducing new topics in conversation, so can be used to highlight the speaker's involvement in the addressee's life world by marking the topic as pending or incipient.…”

A Methodology for the Identification of Topic Transitions in Interaction

“…It has been suggested that transitions can be identifi ed thanks to a number of linguistic markers. A wide array of markers of topic structure have been proposed in the literature: a concord of agreements and/or pauses (Maynard, 1980), existential structures (Berthoud, 1996;Geluykens, 1993), phatics and interjections (Berthoud & Mondada, 1995), dislocations (Grobet, 2002), cle s (Grobet, 2002), discourse markers (Horne et al, 2001) such as so (Bolden, 2006), new referents (Keenan Ochs & Schieff elin, 1976), etc. As far as prosodic cues are concerned, pitch parameters such as higher onsets (Nakajima & Allen, 1993), more range variation (Zellers, 2013) and fundamental equency peaks (Swerts & Geluykens, 1994) have been identifi ed for new topics.…”

Well -prefaced turns in English conversation: A conversation analytic perspective

“…Indeed well very commonly prefaces topic shifts that initiate talk focusing on the speaker's own experiences or concerns. No less than 74% of the topic shift cases examined for this project have this self-attentive character, while only 19% are other-attentive and directly inquire into the recipient's experience or circumstances (Bolden, 2006).…”