This conversation analytic study offers an empirical analysis of the Japanese turn-initial interjection "are." The interjectional "are" is said to be pragmatized from its use as a distal demonstrative and has been considered as an expression of a speaker's internal state of being surprised at something. In contrast, this study…

Although it is clear that unaccented referring expressions are associated with given information in a discourse, it is less clear what aspects of givenness are relevant. We examine whether listeners' expectation of givenness depends on repetition of a referring expression or on contextual evocation of a referent. The results from two visual world…

This study investigated the role of contextual and prosodic information in turn-end estimation by means of a button-press task. We presented participants with turns extracted from a corpus of telephone calls visually (i.e., in transcribed form, word-by-word) and auditorily, and asked them to anticipate turn ends by pressing a button. The…