Филологические науки/ 7. Язык, речь, речевая коммуникация

N. Mongilyova - cand .philol. s., K. Tcherednichenko, of Foreign Philology Departement,

Kazakhstan, A.Baitursynov, Kostanay State University

Backchannels – pragmatics units

Backchannels or listener’s feedback is a term in linguistics which means the response of a listener he gives during a conversation to show attention, interest, and/or a willingness to keep listening.

Tottie (1991) claims that “backchannels are the sounds (and gestures) made in conversation by the current non-speaker, which grease the wheels of conversation but constitute no claim to take over the turn” [1].

Victor Yngve (Yngve, 1970) first used the phrase "back channel" in 1970 in the following passage: "In fact, both the person who has the turn and his partner are simultaneously engaged in both speaking and listening. This is because of the existence of what I call the back channel, over which the person who has the turn receives short messages such as 'yes' and 'uh-huh' without relinquishing the turn" [2].

Backchannels belong to devices providing feedback to the current speaker. These devices appear in both face-to-face and telephone conversation and serve to provide feedback to the current speaker that his message is being received. Wales (2001) maintains that “feedback refers to the process whereby a receiver’s reactions to a message are picked up by the sender and monitored, so that adjustments can be made if necessary” [3].

The receiver’s reaction can be of two types, i.e. vocal and silent. The vocal reactions can be verbal expressions, e.g. well, yes, or various sounds, e.g. mhm, uhuh, laugh. The silent reactions are represented by head nods, smiles, facial expressions, gestures.

The aim of the present research is analyzing and distinguishing the most frequently used backchannels, the influence of gender on the backchannels they use. The analysis is based on three conversational texts taken from Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (1980).

In 1991 Tottie published an article which is called “Conversational style in British and American English: The case of backchannels” (1991), which focuses on backchannels. The source is aimed at using various backchannels by American and English speakers. The author describes backchannels as a feature of conversational style typical for one or the other interlocutor. She introduces backchannels as “ways of showing that you're interested” and determines them as “the sounds (and gestures) made in conversation by the current non-speaker, which grease the wheels of conversation but constitute no claim to take over the turn” [1].

According to Tottie backchannels have several functions, which normally occur simultaneously. They signal understanding and agreement –what can be termed the ‘supportive function’ - or/and encourage the speaker to continue his/her turn, and thus have a ‘regulative function’[1]. Different researchers have emphasized either function; thus Yngve (1970), Fries (1952) and Orestrom (1983) emphasize the supportive function, while Schegloff (1982) takes a more mechanistic view and regards the regulatory function as more important.

Duncan (1974) includes five types of backchannels:

1. really identified, verbalized signals…such…as m-hm, yeah, right, and the like’

2. sentence completions

3. requests for clarification

4. brief restatements

5. head nods and shakes.

However, many of the items included under (1) can also function as turns, in response to overt or implied questions, and so can (3). Moreover, what starts as a backchannel may end up as a turn, if the previous speaker shows no willingness to continue speaking.

Tottie (1991) claims that there are two largest studies based on backchannels, one of them is written by Oreström (1983) and the other one by White (1989). The former one is about short backchannels taken from the London-Lund Corpus. The study shows that the most frequently used backchannel is m (50 %), further yes (34 %), yeah (4 %), mhm (4% - 21 %), no (3 %), with minor occurrence of such items like aha, quite, good etc. where there is 702 examples of backchannels.

Tottie (1991) classifies backchannels as:

1) ‘simple’, as e.g. yeah,

2) ‘double’, which contained repetition of the same item, as e.g. mhm mhm (mhm),

3) ‘complex’, which consisted of backchannelling items belonging to different open-class lexical items, as in yeah…right or yeah I know.

Fries gives the most extensive catalogue of backchannels, occurring in descending order of frequency in the telephone conversations he studied.

Yes (most frequently with rising intonation) ; Unhlhunh (with rising intonation)

Yeah (most frequently with rising intonation); / see; Good;Oh (usually with rising intonation) ; That's right (often with rising intonation); Yes I know; Oh\oh (with falling intonation) ; Fine; So (with rising intonation); Oh my goodness; Oh dear;

Tottie introduces a gender difference as another important aspect of backchannelling - “that in both conversations it is the female partner who produces both the largest number of backchannels and also the greatest variety” [1]. Researches like Fishman (1978) and Nordenstam (1987) support the idea of gender-based difference of backchanneling, which is not according to Tottie (1991) so unambiguous, supporting it with studies which failed to show a higher proportion of backchannels by women than by men. It is obvious that it always depends on particular speakers, their cultural background, environment and different subjective conditions.

References

1. GUNNEL TOTTIE. Conversational style in British and American English: The case of backchannels, 1991.

2. VICTOR YNGVE. "On getting a word in edgewise," page 568. Papers from the Sixth Regional Meeting [of the] Chicago Linguistic Society, 1970.

3. WALES, Katie (2001) A Dictionary of Stylistics. 2nd ed. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. 429 pages