When Listeners Talk: Response Tokens and Listener Stance (Pragmatics and Beyond New Series)

The principal way in which we are social beings, in contrast to individuals, is through talk. 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. One objective of this work is to survey the major distinctions between some backchannels, namely those that can be characterized as response tokens: continuers, acknowledgement tokens, newsmarkers and change-of-activity tokens. 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. Ch. 1. Introduction -- Ch. 2. A Review Of Response Tokens. What Do Response Tokens Do? A Brief Survey Of Eight Response Tokens -- Ch. 3. Five Types Of Mm: The Non-response Tokens. The Lapse Terminator Mm. The Degustatory Mm. The 'hesitation Marker' Mm. The Repair Initiator Mm. The Answering Mm -- Ch. 4. From Continuer To Acknowledgement Token: Mm As A Token Between Mm Hm And Yeah. Distribution Of Mm, Mm Hm/uh Huh And Yeah. Terminal Pitch Direction And The Response Token Mm -- Ch. 5. The Weakness Of Mm: Topic Disalignment And Zero Projection. Mm And Topic Disalignment. Yeah And Mm Hm Followed By Substantial Same Speaker Talk -- Ch. 6. Intonation Contour And The Use Of Mm. Intonation In Conversation: A Review. Mm With Falling Intonation. Mm With Fall-rising Intonation. Mm With Rise-falling Intonation -- Ch. 7. Summary And Future Directions. Rod Gardner. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [269]-281) And Indexes.