WHEN LISTENERS TALK by Rod Gardner ( 9789027251114 ) - Books & Audio Books at Pickabook.co.uk

Item Details

Title:

WHEN LISTENERS TALK

By:

Format:

Hardback

List price:	£97.00
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ISBN 10:

9027251118

ISBN 13:

9789027251114

Publisher:

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING CO

Pub. date:

1 January, 2001

Series:

Pragmatics & Beyond New Series No. 92

Pages:

311

Description:

This work examines brief listener responses to shed light on one of the central features of this human togetherness: the listener. Seemingly unobtrusive response tokens such as "yeah", "mm hm", "okay" and "mm" are examined and are actually found to be complex.

Synopsis:

Listeners are usually considered recipients in conversational interaction, whose main activity is to take in messages from other speakers. In this view, the listening activity is separate from speaking. Another view is that listeners and speakers are equal co-participants in conversations who construct the talk together. In support of this latter view, one finds a group of vocalisations which are quintessentially listener talk - little conversational objects such as uh-huh, oh, mm, yeah, right and mm-hm. These utterances do not have meanings in a conventional dictionary sense, but are nevertheless loaded with complex and subtle information about the stance listeners take to what they are hearing, information that is gleaned not only from their phonetic form, but also from their complex prosodic shape and their placement and timing within the flow of talk. This book summarises eight of these objects, and explores one, mm, in depth.

Illustrations:

index, notes, bibliography

Publication:

Netherlands

Imprint:

John Benjamins Publishing Co

Returns:

Non-returnable

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