The study aimed to disentangle the influence of information status and referential form on the distribution of gestures in sustained discourse. Previous research shows that new and less accessible rather than old and more accessible information, expressed by rich rather than lean referential forms, is more likely to be accompanied by gestures.…

This study formalizes and compares two major hypotheses in speakers' choices of referring expressions: the topicality model that chooses a form based on the topicality of the referent, and the rational model that chooses a form based on the informativity of the form and its speech cost. Simulations suggest that both the topicality of the referent…

Requesting plays a key role in human communication. One can request the same thing in multiple ways (e.g., "Pass the salt" vs. "Could you pass the salt?"). How do speakers determine which request form to produce? And how does this choice affect a recipient's evaluation of a request? Previous analyses of naturalistic…

Through a structured examination of four English causal discourse connectives, our article tackles a gap in the existing research, which focuses mainly on written language production, and entirely lacks attests on English spoken discourse. Given the alleged general nature of English connectives commonly emphasized in the literature, the underlying…

Ambiguity in discourse is pervasive, yet mechanisms of production and processing suggest that it tends to be compensated in context. The present study sets out to analyze the combination of discourse markers (such as "but" or "moreover") with other discourse signals (such as semantic relations or punctuation marks) across three…

Speakers use speech and gestures to represent referents in discourse. Depending on referents' information status, in speech speakers will vary richness of expression (e.g., lexical noun phrase [NP]/pronoun), nominal definiteness (indefinite/definite), and grammatical role (subject/object). This study tested whether these three linguistic markers…

In spoken discourse, understanding irony requires the apprehension of subtle cues, such as the speaker's tone of voice (prosody), which often reveal the speaker's affective stance toward the listener in the context of the utterance. To shed light on the interplay of linguistic content and prosody on impressions of spoken criticisms and compliments…

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives found in most Indo-European languages has seldom been assessed. In this article we demonstrate that some adults have difficulties recognizing correct and…

Analyses of 34 cases of direct reported thought found in ordinary Korean conversations illustrate a routine practice in the use of reported thought-reenacting a prior thought to demonstrate how the speaker's current stance originated. Often, such thoughts are not simply momentary, isolated thoughts in passing but are consequential thoughts…

This study investigates the interactional work involved in ratifying mutual participation in online, multiparty, voice-based chat rooms. The purpose of this article is to provide a preliminary sketch of how talk and participation is managed in a spoken communication environment that comprises interactants who are not physically copresent but are…

The tracking of entities in discourse is known to be a bimodal phenomenon. Speakers achieve cohesion in speech by alternating between full lexical forms, pronouns, and zero anaphora as they track referents. They also track referents in co-speech gestures. In this study, we explored how viewpoint is deployed in reference tracking, focusing on…

Prosodic features in spontaneous speech help disambiguate implied meaning not explicit in linguistic surface structure, but little research has examined how these signals manifest themselves in real conversations. Spontaneously produced verbal irony utterances generated between familiar speakers in conversational dyads were acoustically analyzed…

Conversation coordinates joint activities and the joint projects that compose them. Participants coordinate (1) vertical transitions on entering and exiting joint projects; and (2) horizontal transitions in continuing within them. Transitions are coordinated using project markers such as uh-huh, yeah, right, and okay. In the authors' proposal,…

This study examines a corpus of conversations of Turkish preschool-age children with adults, with the goal of analyzing 2 types of extended discourse structures (i.e., lists and narratives). Lists and narratives are compared with respect to (a) their internal structures, and (b) their social functions in the participants' daily interactions. The…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether there are cultural differences in topic organization and role-related topic control in dinner conversations; such differences may function as a means for socialization into communicative styles. The research was designed as a comparative study of two geographically close but linguistically very…