Manual backchannel responses in signers' conversations in Swedish Sign Language

Mesch, Johanna

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2016.08.011

Cited by 28 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…But below this lies a deeper commonality that is likely functionally motivated: as vowelless nasals produced with labial closure, continuers are among the most minimal tokens of recipiency available to users of spoken language (Gardner 2001). As we saw earlier, acknowledgement tokens account for 80% of interjections attested in a corpus of Swedish Sign Language (Mesch 2016). Likewise, in the CallHome corpora of American English, Arabic, German, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, these items occur in up to 1 in 5 turns (Cecil 2010), making continuers likely the most frequent type of interjection within and across languages.…”

Section: Phatic Interjectionsmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…For instance, in one corpus of spoken Dutch (Huls 1982), the great majority of interjection tokens was found to have interactional and interpersonal functions, and only about 7% (29 out of 412) was expressive of the speaker's mental state (Hofstede 1999). Likewise, a corpus-based study of interjections in Swedish Sign Language showed that the most frequent lexical signs categorized as interjections have backchanneling and affirmative functions, and account for over 80% of corpus tokens (Mesch 2016). Based on this, we can say that the idea of interjections as primarily emotive words, though understandable from a historical perspective, is untenable and provides only a partial view of the word class as a whole.…”

Section: Form and Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Interjections (Oxford Handbook of Word Classes)

Dingemanse¹

2021

Preprint

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No class of words has better claims to universality than interjections. At the same time, no category has more variable content than this one, traditionally the catch-all basket for linguistic items that bear a complicated relation to sentential syntax. Interjections are a mirror reflecting methodological and theoretical assumptions more than a coherent linguistic category that affords unitary treatment. This chapter focuses on linguistic items that typically function as free-standing utterances, and on some of the conceptual, methodological, and theoretical questions generated by such items. A key move is to study these items in the setting of conversational sequences, rather than from the “flatland” of sequential syntax. This makes visible how some of the most frequent interjections streamline everyday language use and scaffold complex language. Approaching interjections in terms of their sequential positions and interactional functions has the potential to reveal and explasin patterns of universality and diversity in interjections.

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Section: Phatic Interjectionsmentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Form and Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interjections (Oxford Handbook of Word Classes)

Dingemanse¹

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A few examples of these tokens are december (‘December’), nodig (‘necessary’) and woon (‘live-in’), to name just a few. This is quite like the backchanneling behaviour in spoken languages (Duncan, 1974; McCarthy, 2002; Wong & Peters, 2007), and also not unlike manual backchanneling in sign languages (Mesch, Nilsson & Wallin, 2011). We did no in-depth analysis of solo mouthings used in backchanneling, we focussed instead on solo mouthings occurring in the mouth action stream, to be discussed next.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 64%

Bimodal code-mixing: Dutch spoken language elements in NGT discourse

2016

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“…Their in-between status (Turner, 1969) is an essential part of their form and function, as they occupy the interstices of talk and frequently serve to navigate liminal and transitory spaces in interaction. Besides the phenomena described in this issue, liminal signs can take the form of coughs (Bailey, 2009), sighs (Hoey, 2014), and inbreaths (Torreira, Bögels, & Levinson, 2015;Winter & Grawunder, 2012) as well as visual conduct like winks, nose wrinkles, and "thinking" facial expressions, some of which may play broadly equivalent roles in sign language interaction (Mesch, 2016).…”

Section: Liminal Signsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Sound and Speech: Liminal Signs in Interaction

Dingemanse¹

2020

Research on Language and Social Interaction

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When people talk, they recruit a wide range of expressive devices for interactional work, from sighs, sniffs, clicks, and whistles to other conduct that borders on the linguistic. These resources are used in the management of turn and sequence and the marking of stance and affect, and they represent an aspect of the interactional machinery that is as elusive as it is powerful. Phenomena long assumed to be beyond the purview of linguistic inquiry emerge as systematically deployed practices whose ambiguous degree of control and convention allows participants to carry out subtle interactional work without committing to specific words. While these resources have been characterized as nonlexical, nonverbal, or nonconventional, I propose that they are unified in their liminality: They work well precisely because they equivocate between sound and speech. The empirical study of liminal signs shows the promise of sequential analysis for building a science of language on interactional foundations.Physiologically, speech is an overlaid function, or, to be more precise, a group of overlaid functions. It gets what service it can out of organs and functions, nervous and muscular, that have come into being and are maintained for very different ends than its own. (Sapir, 1921, p. 8) Everyday language use is full of sighs, sniffs, whistles, clicks, and other conduct that borders on the linguistic. For a long time, these sounds and actions have escaped analytical attention. One reason is technological: Recording and transcription methods were not up to the task. Another is theoretical: A focus on idealized competence led a generation of linguists to look away from what was seen as the flotsam and jetsam of mere performance. But the most intriguing reason is delightfully self-referential: For talk-in-interaction to work as smoothly as it does, perhaps some aspects of it must seem like not-talk.The articles in this issue move the goalposts of research on language in social interaction in three ways. They showcase new affordances of technology and transcription that bring new areas within reach of systematic scrutiny. They respecify conceptual foundations to call into question received views on what is and isn't linguistic. And they bring into view some of the more elusive aspects of language in everyday use. The interactional resources we encounter here emerge as integral elements of an interactional machinery that is "finely powerful" (McHoul, 2005, citing Harvey Sacks's unfinished book) and that underpins the most sophisticated uses of language.

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Manual backchannel responses in signers' conversations in Swedish Sign Language

Cited by 28 publications

References 20 publications

Interjections (Oxford Handbook of Word Classes)

Interjections (Oxford Handbook of Word Classes)

Bimodal code-mixing: Dutch spoken language elements in NGT discourse

Between Sound and Speech: Liminal Signs in Interaction

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