Parsing particles in Wa’ikhana

Abstract

This article analyzes the use of several response particles in face-to-face interaction in Wa’ikhana, an East Tukano language of northwestern Amazonia. Adopting a Conversation Analysis approach, we explore details of each particle, considering their prosodic shapes, the action contexts in which they occur, and their sequential positioning, all crucial to understanding their meanings in interaction. Our analysis shows that Wa’ikhana response particles exhibit both universal and language-particular properties, thus demonstrating the contributions of data from lesser-studied languages to research on language in social interaction, and the value of an interactional approach in the study of under-described, and often endangered, indigenous languages.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------ANALISANDO PARTÍCULAS EM WA’IKHANAEste artigo analisa o uso de um conjunto de partículas responsivas em interação cotidiana em Wa’ikhana, língua da família Tukano Oriental, falada no noroeste amazônico. Adotando a abordagem da Análise de Conversação, exploramos detalhes de cada partícula, considerando sua forma prosódica, o contexto de ação em que ocorre e sua posição sequencial, todos cruciais para o entendimento do seu significado em interação. Nossa análise mostra que partículas responsivas em Wa’ikhana exibem propriedades universais e próprias, demonstrando a contribuição de dados provindos de línguas pouco conhecidas à pesquisa sobre linguagem e interação social, bem como o valor da abordagem interacional no estudo de línguas indígenas pouco estudadas e muitas vezes ameaçadas.---Original em inglês.

Interjections (Oxford Handbook of Word Classes)

“…The diversity in surface forms makes items like this pliable tools for showing various degrees of recipiency, alignment and involvement (Müller 1996;Wilkinson & Kitzinger 2006;Williams et al 2020). 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).…”

“…In the Siwu example we saw how m:hm helps shape the delivery of stories by displaying alignment with the storytelling activity. Many spoken languages appear to make a similar nasal vocalization available for the same interactional work, as seen in m-hm in English (Gardner 2001), mm in Danish (Steensig & Sørensen 2019), ˈm̩ m̩ in Wa'ikhana (Williams et al 2020), and m/ŋ in Cantonese (Liesenfeld 2019). Such forms are well-adapted to serve as continuers because they signify ongoing attention with minimal articulatory effort and provide the perfect canvas to overlay with prosodic contours for stancemarking (as Gardner 2001 argues for English).…”

How should descriptive grammars cover interjections?

“…The diversity in surface forms makes items like this pliable tools for showing various degrees of recipiency, alignment, and involvement (Müller 1996;Wilkinson & Kitzinger 2006;Williams et al 2020). 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).…”

“…In the Siwu example we saw how m:hm helps shape the delivery of stories by displaying alignment with the storytelling activity. Many spoken languages appear to make a similar nasal vocalization available for the same interactional work, as seen in m-hm in English (Gardner 2001), mm in Danish (Steensig & Sørensen 2019), ˈm̩ m̩ in Wa'ikhana (Williams et al 2020), and m/ ŋ in Cantonese (Liesenfeld 2019). Such forms are well adapted to serve as continuers because they signify ongoing attention with minimal articulatory effort and provide the perfect canvas to overlay with prosodic contours for stance marking (as Gardner 2001 argues for English).…”

Bottom-up discovery of structure and variation in response tokens (‘backchannels’) across diverse languages

“…Prior work includes in-depth studies of the response token system in English, Japanese and a handful of other languages [8,5,21] as well as comparative work on prosodic and multimodal aspects [22,23,24]. Besides a small number of single-language descriptive studies [25,26,27], the bulk of empirical, experimental and computational work has focused on a handful of wellresourced Indo-European and East Asian languages. We cannot assume that findings based on this small sample of languages apply across the board.…”