It's all about the interaction: listener responses as a discourse-organisational variable
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Date
26/06/2020Author
Eiswirth, Mirjam Elisabeth
Metadata
Abstract
Language is humanity’s key tool for communication. This entails the fact that it
generally occurs in interaction between two or more individuals. However, we
do not yet have a theory of language variation and change that integrates our
understanding of the interactional nature of language with the variationist analysis.
This is especially challenging for variables above the level of the phoneme, but also
applies to phonological variables that are impacted by the interactional context
they stand in.
This thesis focuses on Listener Responses, a variable above the level of the
phoneme, and presents a theory and methodology of sociolinguistic variation
that allows us to develop (1) interactionally sensitive de1nitions of discourselevel
variables, the envelope of variation, and to quantify them in an accountable
manner, (2) coding schemes which situate the function-based variants in the
interactional structure and thus allow for an analysis of structural constraints
on variation, and (3) a way of applying inferential statistics to variation based on
structural as well as social variables. With respect to phonological variables, this
thesis shows how the level of (inter)action relates to the actual realisations we
observe.
This is done based on the example of Listener Responses as a discourseorganisational
variable, and gender as a social variable. Listener Responses are
de1ned as all the things Listener can do without taking over the 2oor. Their
frequency is thus quanti1ed relative to the number of words in the longer stretch
of talk produced by the main Speaker. In the data at hand here, cross-gender
accommodation is observed, with female Listeners decreasing their response
frequency when listening to men, and male Listeners increasing theirs when
listening to women. Next, a taxonomy of Listener Response actions is developed
based on existing interactional literature and a close structural and interactional
analysis of the data. Seven Action Types are proposed, and used as a coding
scheme in the next two analysis chapters. The third analysis chapter shows
variation in the frequency of the individual Action Types based on Speaker and
Listener gender. There is an important structural constraint on variation located at
the level of interactional structure: those Action Types that are strongly predicated
by what the main Speaker does in the segment preceding the response are more
strongly in2uenced by the main Speaker, while the Listener has a greater impact
on those that are not constrained by the preceding segment. Both the 1rst and this
analysis chapter draw on zero-in2ated poisson regression analysis as a useful tool
for the analysis of variation in frequency. The 1nal analysis chapter looks at the
relationship between the different action types and the actual linguistic realisation
of the utterance, thus linking the discourse-level to the phonetic and prosodic
level. It demonstrates that the linguistic realisation of any Listener Response is
tailored to the talk that has preceded it on all levels of linguistic structure, and that
prosodic and lexical shape need to be considered together, particularly for lexical
items that can be used to do different actions.
Overall, this thesis contributes to sociolinguistic theory and methodology by
presenting a way of integrating interactional and variationist analyses from the
de1nition of the variable, the envelope of variation, an overall frequency operationalisation,
describing and de1ning the variants, to exploring the link between
interactional function and linguistic realisation. It can be extended to other variables,
both linguistic and social.