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Negotiating Activity Closings with Reciprocal Head Nods in Mandarin Conversation

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Book cover Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings

Abstract

Head nods observed in naturally occurring conversation are usually patterned. They not only accompany speech, but also have interactional functions of their own. This paper explores the interactional functions of temporally and sequentially adjacent head nods between the recipient and the speaker in Mandarin face-to-face conversation. These head nods are used by conversational participants to negotiate the closing of telling activities. The recipient initiates head nods at the possible completion of a telling. The teller usually produces reciprocal head nods immediately after the (onset of the) recipient nods and closes the current telling activity. It is argued that the recipient head nods are treated as completion-implicative of the current activity, and the speaker uses reciprocal head nods and summary statements to conclude the activity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mahjong is a Chinese tile-based game. The game is played with 144 tiles by 4 players.

  2. 2.

    See Drew and Holt (1998) and Maynard (1980) for other techniques used by the teller with a similar interactional function.

  3. 3.

    Erhu is a traditional Chinese instrument.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Xiaoting Li

Authors
  1. Xiaoting Li
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiaoting Li .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of New Philologies, Modern Languages, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Elisabeth Reber

  2. Department of English, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Cornelia Gerhardt

Appendices

Appendix A

The transcription conventions of GAT-2 (Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2) (Selting et al. 2009) used in this article:

(.):

micro-pause

(-), (–), (—):

short, medium or long pauses

(1.0):

pauses which are more than 1.0 second

=:

latching of intonation phrases

ACcent :

primary or main accent

:::

prolongation or stretching of the sound just preceding ::

≪creaky>>:

phonation feature of a stretch of speech

≪p>>:

piano, soft

↘:

one head nod

–:

level final pitch movement

;:

falling to mid final pitch movement

.:

falling to low final pitch movement

Appendix B

ASP:

aspect marker

ASSC:

associative

BA:

a pretransitive marker

CL:

classifier

CRS:

currently relevant state

CSC:

complex stative construction

NEG:

negative

PFV:

perfective aspect

PRT:

particle

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Li, X. (2019). Negotiating Activity Closings with Reciprocal Head Nods in Mandarin Conversation. In: Reber, E., Gerhardt, C. (eds) Embodied Activities in Face-to-face and Mediated Settings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97325-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97325-8_11

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97324-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97325-8

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