LINGUIST List 13.1808

Fri Jun 28 2002

Review: Socioling:When Listeners Talk,Gardner (2002)

Editor for this issue: Dina Kapetangianni <dinalinguistlist.org>

What follows is another discussion note contributed to our Book Discussion Forum. We expect these discussions to be informal and interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially invited to join in.

If you are interested in leading a book discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available for discussion." (This means that the publisher has sent us a review copy.) Then contact Simin Karimi at siminlinguistlist.org or Terry Langendoen at terrylinguistlist.org.

Directory

  • Colin Fraser, Gardner (2002) Socioling: When Listeners Talk

    Message 1: Gardner (2002) Socioling: When Listeners Talk

     Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 18:20:27 +0000
    From: Colin Fraser <cfraser1dai.ed.ac.uk>
    Subject: Gardner (2002) Socioling: When Listeners Talk


    Gardner, Rod (2002) Socioling:When Listeners Talk:Response tokens and listener stance. John Benjamins, Hardback: ISBN: 1 58811 093 1, Pages: xxii, 281, Price:USD 89.00 Hardback: ISBN:90 272 5111 8, Price: EUR 98.00

    Book Announcement on Linguist: http://linguistlist.org/get-book.html?BookID=2820

    Colin Fraser

    GENERAL PRESENTATION

    This is a well written and thorough account of an often neglected area of linguistic research - mono and bi-syllabic response tokens (such as "hmm", "uh-huh") uttered by participants in dialogue.

    SYNOPSIS

    Gardner's introductory chapter makes clear his belief that much linguistic research has focused too much on the producer of language and not enough on the activities of the listener of these productions. He outlines those who he feels are the culprits and then distinguishes them from those who, in his opinion, have championed the listener's cause - persons from the area of sociology (Goffman), psycholinguistics (Clark) and conversational analysis (Schegloff and Sacks). Indeed it is the methods of this last group he himself adopts. He goes through each of the types of activites that participants who are in the role of listener can perform: Continuers (like "Mm hm", which hand the floor back to the immediately prior speaker); Acknowledgments (such as "Yeah", which claim agreement or understanding of the prior turn); Newsmarkers (like "Oh", which mark the prior speaker's utterance as newsworthy in some way); Change of Activity tokens (such as "Alright" which mark a transition to a new topic in the talk); Assessments, which evaluate the talk of the prior speaker; Brief questions, which are attempts to clarify or seek repair; Collaborative Completions, where one speaker completes the previous utterance of the other speaker. It is the first four of these (bagged together under the "semantically transparent" term of response tokens) which are the focus of his study, principally because these have been either generally ignored out of hand by previous researchers as "trivial" and thus unworthy of study, or lumped together into the catch all category of "backchannel" which neglects to capture the observable differences in how each response token may be used.

    In the second chapter Gardner takes us through 8 common response tokens and their common usages. He begins by setting himself a series of open research questions in the area, emphasising that response tokens should be interpreted according to their placement within a sequence of talk and that prosodic features are especially important. The function of this chapter is to introduce the reader to the various uses response token can have within dialogue. However, due to their flexibility, they can appear to be "semantically weak, if not empty", making his task a difficult one. One of the ways he devises to get round this problem is to look at intonational contour, something he develops in later chapters of the book, offering interpretations of various tokens according to prosodic features. He offers a series of theses concerning the function various tokens are performing, arranged according to the four categories mentioned in the last paragraph.

    Conceding that it is impossible to provide an exhaustive interpretation of all response tokens, Gardner decides to look at "Mm", which becomes the token of choice for the rest of the book. His reason for this is that it has been fairly neglected and the fact that it has so many apparent uses. He also posits a few ideas why this might be case - such as the fact it is the only sound in English which has the mouth closed from onset to termination. Chapters 3 and 4 offer us eight types of "Mm". In Chapter 3, he offers us the non-response types - such as being used for lapses in the conversation, expressing pleasure, hesitiating, being used to intiate repairs and being used to answer someone. In Chapter 4, Gardner tries to distinguish "Mm" in its response token capacity from "Mm hm" and "Yeah" which, he maintains, have slightly different usages. Whereas "Mm hm" is what he calls a "classic continuer", in that it offers the floor back to the speaker to whom the token is orientated, "Yeah" has more of an affirmative role. "Mm" can have both these roles and Gardner argues that by observing the intonation contour of a particular token one can infer its likely response role.

    The very "weakness" of "Mm" is covered in Chapter 5, where Gardner claims that the utterance of this token does not demonstrate any particularly strong commitment to the topic. It is thus a neutral token in his view, and he defends this with recourse to several examples where we can see "Mm" being used by a speakers who do not necessarily take up the opportunity to say something about the topic of the previous turn but do take the chance to take the turn. Indeed when it is used in the "turn initial" position, that is at the start of turn, its primary function is merely to demonstrate receipt of the utterance. It rarely occurs, in Gardner's analysis, after an agreement or an assessment of what has been said.

    After his analysis in the previous chapter of "Mm" as primarily an acknowledgement token, Gardner considers in Chapter 6 how "Mm" can fluidly change function according to prosodic features. His analysis focuses on the three most frequently occuring intonational mappings - falling, fall-rising and rise-falling contour. The first of these occurs in about 70 per cent of "Mm"s in Gardner's corpora, and it is this which performs the acknowledging role. He claims that when it is uttered it merely says that the turn constructional unit to which it is oriented has been received without problems. "Mm" with a fall-rising contour has the effect of turning the acknowledger into a continuer, even though it retains some "acknowledging" aspects. In this case, it seems to be making a claim that the turn constructional unit to which it is oriented is incomplete and is urging further talk by the other speaker. The rise-falling "Mm" has some aspects of the falling "Mm" but demonstrates a heightened sense of involvement in the talk, and has more features in common with an "assessment".

    In his final chapter, Gardner outlines some future directions he sees for work in this area. After his own analysis of the prosody of "Mm" he encourages future work on the other tokens which he identifies in his second chapter along these lines. What role do regional differences play in the function certain tokens perform? And what about individual differences in the usage of some tokens?

    EVALUATION

    Gardner's analysis of response tokens is certainly thorough, often stimulating and provides some facinating insights into the various functions these can perform in conversation. He acknowledges himself that the categories he has conjured up for his task may well be insufficient to capture the variety of uses of each of his selected tokens. However, his achievement in this book in all the more admirable in that he takes the effort through detailed and very often illuminating analysis of the conversational situation to tease out the subtle differences in use of each token. The second chapter stands out as an excellent review of the much neglected area of research into response token and Gardner's thorough analysis of "Mm" will set the standard for future work in this area.

    ABOUT THE REVIEWER Colin Fraser is presently a researcher in the Division of Informatics, Edinburgh University, where he recently graduated with a Masters in Cognitive Science. His research interests are focused around different approaches to modelling dialogue, although he presently works in the rather different area of information retrieval.