Conversational features: politeness

CONVERSATIONAL FEATURES: POLITENESS
Key words: Conversational features, politeness, hesitations, redundancy, repetition
3.1. Speaking part (explaining the topic).

Conversation proceeds on the basis of one turn after another. Turn belongs to a single speaker. But how do we know when it is our turn to talk. Turns are negotiated and renegotiated by participants during conversation. Continual negotiation is a general feature of conversational organization. But how do we achieve this organization?

3.2. Turn-taking and turn constructional units (TCU’s)(activity -1)
TCU’s are units of speech. The boundaries of these units are called turn transition relevance points (TTRP’S). These are points at which intervention from another speaker is syntactically or semantically possible. At a TTRP:



3.3.Repair (simultaneous speech and silence)
Participants will not usually talk at the same time. Simultaneous speech and silence are problems which need to be repaired. In simultaneous speech, one person usually wins the right to speak and be attended to by the other participants. When the turn taking rules (above) fail to operate, there is silence. Silence is a problem which needs to be repaired. Who is the person who repairs the silences in the conversation between Miss A and Mr B?


3.4. Adjacency pairs

Spoken interaction is often structured around pairs of adjacent utterances (utterances which occur one after the other) in which the second utterance is fuinctionally dependent on the first.

Question-answer: “how are you?” “fine”
Greetings: “good morning” “good morning”
In these sequences we expect the first part to be followed by the second part. If it is not there, we interpret it as rude, unfriendly or socially inept. Different types of questions produce different types of response. For example, a tag-question organizes a response better than an open question.