This study examines head nods produced as embodied and silent answers to polar questions before a transition relevance place has been reached. It discusses the notion of "response" and the ways in which the literature conceptualizes head nods. The analysis of video recordings of ordinary and institutional multiparty interactions shows…

This volume sheds empirical light on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) by providing five sets of analyses of two longitudinal, interactional datasets, involving two dyads exchanging emails over one academic semester. The collective study on CDST is the first of its kind, in that it delves into multiple subsystems of learner language,…

Background: It is known that dysarthria arising from Parkinson's disease may affect intelligibility in conversational interaction. Research has also shown that Parkinson's disease may affect cognition and cause word-retrieval difficulties and pragmatic problems in the use of language. However, it is not known whether or how these…

Examines some characteristics of "Mm," in particular its variants, as a weak acknowledging token, a continuer, and a weak assessment within the Australian context. Findings indicate that the most common "Mm" is best characterized as an acknowledging object used to mark unproblematic receipt of the immediately prior talk and no…

Analyzes excerpts from eighteen of Robert M. Krauss's dialog transcripts in order to characterize the sequential and structural relations between naming and describing. Specifically, investigates how a referential description is shortened into a name through use, and what parts of antecedent descriptive phrases are selected to form the consequent…

Research is in progress on oral interactive discourse, that is, discourse produced by several participants working in collaboration. The intent of the research is to investigate how the discourse is organized at several different levels of structure (acts, sequences of acts, interactive structure, propositional content, and formal realizations).…

The theory of the coordinated management of meaning (CMM) describes the structural relationship between a conversation as it appears in a verbatim transcript and as it appears in the meaning-system of the participants. The five essential features of CMM theory are: a set of four propositions about the nature of communication and human behavior, a…

This paper studies meaning as a construct of human interaction. Basic to this approach is the concept of the act of communication, which may be realized verbally or non-verbally. In order to integrate non-verbal behaviors into descriptions of discourse and interaction, a series of functional, not anatomic, categories is needed. For the kinesic…

Speech errors have been used in the construction of production models of the phonological and semantic components of language, and for a model of interactional processes. Errors also provide insight into how speakers plan discourse and syntactic structure,. Different types of discourse exhibit different types of error. The present data are taken…

In order to design a cognitive model of ethnic attitudes, an interdisciplinary project has analyzed strategies used in everyday conversation among majority members about minority groups, e.g., immigrant workers from Turkey and Morocco and people from Surinam. Data were collected through undirected interviews among people in an Amsterdam…

This paper argues that traditional techniques of content analysis which have been applied to classroom verbal interaction studies fail to account for certain types of implicit information, and presents a technique, called "reconstruction," that provides for the inclusion of such information in a content analysis. It is argued that if…

The Georgetown Round Table on discourse analysis dealt with the following aspects of the topic: Emerson's essay on language; oral remembering and narrative structures; persuasive discourse; social construction of topical cohesion; discourse as an interactional achievement; the place of intonation; topic as the unit of analysis in a criminal law…

In any successful conversation, a speaker must select both what is said and how it is said on the basis of various estimates of the listener's abilities, knowledge and interests. Most research on linguistic input to children has focused on the tendency of speakers to simplify their speech for the younger listener. Little attention has been paid to…

This is a report on a proposed research project on the interaction processes (verbal, non-verbal, and kinesic) present in a seminar situation, with a view towards positing a model of interaction in this type of situation. The seminar was chosen as a setting because it provides a structured context with a variety of discursive acts, favoring the…