Despite their enormous frequency of occurrence in everyday talk, particles (little words like "well", "oh", "yeah", "uh huh") have long been overlooked or sidelined in linguistic inquiry. Similarly, conjunctions have received relatively little attention from linguists working with written data or in traditional paradigms. Most commonly (if at all), they have been investigated with respect to the logico-semantic relations they can express when using them to join clauses together to form complex sentences.
However, these little words matter. They are part and parcel of our daily conduct, and they fulfill extremely important social, pragmatic, and interactional functions in spoken interaction. They are the “seen-but-unnoticed” grease for the interactional engine. Like gravity, they are so natural and self-evident to us that we sometimes tend to overlook them and forget about their existence, despite being surrounded by them (and even using them ourselves) all the time.
In this course, we will explore some of the ways in which these little words matter in spoken interaction. Using Conversation Analytic (CA) & Interactional Linguistic (IL) methods, we will investigate which social, pragmatic, and/or interactional functions they can fulfill and how they help us to manage certain recurrent interactional tasks.
Data will be in English, mostly, but with comparison with other languages as well.
- Kursleiter*in: Dr. Taiane Malabarba