The shared basis of all our work in English Linguistics is spoken language, as in spontaneous conversation, classroom discourse and oral history interviews or in dialogue scripted for performance in plays, films and television.

My current research concerns conflict talk and humor as well as pragmatic markers.
Forthcoming Presentations
  • “Listener activities in English conversation” for the panel on Spoken English at the First Meeting of the International Society for the Study of English (ISLE) in Freiburg, October 2008
Forthcoming Articles
  • Negotiating the reception of stories in conversation: Teller strategies for modulating response. Narrative Inquiry 2008
  • Interjections as pragmatic markers. Journal of Pragmatics (Special Issue on ‘Pragmatic Markers), 2008/2009
Forthcoming Papers
  • Interdiscourse Humor: Contrast, Merging, Accommodation. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 20, (forthcoming).
  • Conflict and Humor in Conversation. Current Trends in Pragmatics, ed. by Piotr Cap. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press (forthcoming) (co-author Alice Spitz).
Dissertations supervised
  • SPITZ, Alice. Power plays - Mother-daughter disputes in contemporary plays by women: A study
    in discourse analysis    .
    obtain additional information here.
  • BUBEL, Claudia. The linguistic construction of character relations in TV drama: Doing friendship in
    Sex and the City    .
    obtain addtitional information here.
  • GERHARDT, Cornelia. The language of television viewing.
Abstracts
Listener activities in English conversation

Neal R. Norrick

Listeners do not inertly and silently receive talk by speakers. They actively demonstrate listenership and encourage other participants to continue to hold the floor with audible and visible signals. They engage in various “activities in the back-channel”—by contrast with the primary channel occupied with talk by the primary speaker (Yngve 1970). In this paper, I describe verbal listener activities in American English conversation based on data from several transcribed corpora.

Listener activities differ in fundamental ways. First, they signal: (1) recipiency, (2) changes in information states or (3) emotional involvement in foregoing talk (cf. Gardner 1998); second, they mark varying degrees of speaker incipiency, from the pure continuer uh-huh, to the pre-shifter yeah and on to the topic switcher okay (Jefferson 1993). I will show that listener activities further differ in how likely they are to elicit a response from the primary speaker in the next turn. The frequency of responses elicited starts at about zero with (1) unobtrusive continuers like uh-huh and m-hm, and increases through (2) assessments like wow and gosh, on to (3) information state tokens like oh and hm, and peaks at (4) insistent discourse markers like well and so. I will focus on items from these last two classes and the kinds of responses they elicit.

We shall see that listener activities function not only to enable a multi-unit turn by another; they can also prompt explanations and extensions of stories. Even when listener activities primarily signal recipiency, they convey varying degrees of emotional involvement and insistence on direct response to their contribution.
Negotiating the reception of stories in conversation:
Teller strategies for modulating response

Neal R. Norrick

In this paper, I explore linguistic resources conversational storytellers deploy to increase listener response to their performances, paying special attention to the unobtrusive strategy of deploying a free-standing item from the class of discourse markers in response to an initial listener reaction, as in:

Jennifer: I mean like they wanted twenty bucks for the marble one
and they were selling them at Broadway for twenty bucks.
Sara: hm.
Jennifer: so.
Sara: so it depends what it is?
Jennifer: what it is, yeah,

When Jennifer receives only a minimal hm response, she produces a free-standing so, precipitating a more complete reaction. In order to contextualize this minimalist strategy, I begin by investigating other more obvious strategies for modulating audience response, such as (1) repeating a salient phrase, particularly a piece of dialogue; (2) adding an explanation of the point of a story marked with I mean; (3) drawing out some consequence of the story. Especially when a listener offers a potential story completion or overlaps with one by the teller, the teller may repeat or extend the suggested completion in various ways.

Tannen (1978) showed the importance of listener expectations about stories and tellability for the storytelling performance, but, clearly, tellers also have expectations about how their stories will be received. When the response is different or less substantial than tellers expect, they have various resources at their disposal for modulating response. Some of these resources are very obvious such as repeating crucial dialogue entire or formulating the significance of the story, but others are much subtler such as discourse markers like so and y’know in third position, urging listeners to produce more appropriate feedback.
Interjections as pragmatic markers

Neal R. Norrick

In my paper, I investigate interjections functioning as pragmatic markers. First, I review corpus data on the frequency of interjections as pragmatic markers initiating new turns. The interjections in this most frequent group are: oh, uh, m, um, tsk. These are primary interjections, deriving from response cries in the sense of Goffman (1981). As a pragmatic marker, oh signals receipt of information and a shift in cognitive state, while the other four (uh, m, um and tsk) function mainly within the participation framework of discourse to hold the turn and to fill pauses. I will show that much of the interactional significance of these primary interjections derives from their characteristic position as turn initiators, and much of their meaning in any particular case depends on their intonation contour.

The primary interjections are distinguished from secondary interjections like boy and shit, which derive from major parts of speech and signal emotional involvement. Both primary and secondary interjections can stand alone as complete utterances, generally meant to index an internal state of the transmitter, but they frequently occur as parallel pragmatic markers of cognitive states on Fraser’s (1996) definition, e.g.

Amy: we just saw a police car using a siren.
Pat: boy did we ever.

BH> I was just going oh wow congratulations and=
AG> =SHIT that's great.

Nevertheless, secondary interjections do not just function as parallel pragmatic markers, but also in ways similar to proper discourse markers, signalling contrast, elaboration, and transition, for instance in the passage below, where hell acts as a marker one might paraphrase as by contrast or even worse.

LUCY: you have those helicopters too,
that land at the hospital?

ALLEN: hell,
we get the ones that do the traffic on Rutherford Avenue.

Moreover, a few secondary interjections in initial turn position function as intensifiers rather than pragmatic markers when they precede bare yeah and no, as in hell yeah and shit no.

I demonstrate the open-ended nature of the class of interjections. Despite their variability, the pragmatic functions of ever new interjections seem always to be clear to listeners in the concrete context. Interjections thus represent an open, infinitely extendable class of items, unlike the relatively circumscribed, closed classes of other pragmatic markers, and their pragmatic marker functions follow from their general status as expressions of shifts in cognitive states of various kinds. In conclusion, I advocate: (1) treating interjections a sui generis class with recurrent pragmatic functions, (2) looking for universal properties of interjections across languages, and (3) seeking to explain the pragmatic characteristics of interjections as far as possible in universal terms.