Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 50

Understanding dialogues also requires uncovering the ways in which intersubjectivity is achieved within a floor or across a series of turns. That is, how do interactants make sense of each other's turns and floor contributions? Achieving intersubjectivity—or, in simple terms, to co‐construct meaning—is accomplished in a number of ways. The current section will examine two issues related to understanding the process in which interactants achieve intersubjectivity: resolving communicative troubles and maintaining understanding in the face of ostensibly no trouble in communication.

Understanding the first issue—that is, the ways in which interactants resolve troubles in dialogues—requires identifying where the trouble source is. A trouble is an umbrella term that covers all problems, mistakes, slips of the tongue, tips of the tongue, and mishearings that may occur in dialogues. For example, in example 4, speaker B requests clarification and, as a result, treats speaker A's previous turn as the source of trouble.

1 (4)Speaker A:I goed to the zoo.Speaker B:Huh?Speaker A:I went to the zoo.

Knowing where the trouble source is allows dialogue researchers to investigate many interactional issues. First, researchers can identify the sequential organization in which intersubjectivity is achieved. For example, in example 4, it takes two turns for speaker A to repair the trouble source: speaker B requests for clarification and speaker A repairs the trouble source. Second, it is also possible to identify that a speaker other than the one responsible for the trouble source initiates a request for clarification, and that the speaker of the trouble source is the interactant who corrects the trouble (Schegloff, Jefferson, & Sacks, 1977). Third, the work of linguistic anthropologists and discursive psychologists has shown that the sequential organization of dealing with troubles in communication provides an analytic window into social issues (Lester & O'Reilly, 2018). That is, how interactants deal with troubles reveals important information regarding the social roles and relationships of the interactants—whether, for example, an institutional role requires an interactant to overtly correct mistakes in communication, as is the case in many classrooms (see Seedhouse, 2004). For instance, in example 4, speaker B could be a teacher responding to a student's grammatical mistake. Fourth, researchers can examine how interactants account for troubles in communication. For example, speaker B requests clarification, but does not specifically identify where the trouble source is within speaker A's turn. As a result, an analyst can see that while speaker B does not specifically identify the trouble within the previous turn, speaker A interprets the request for clarification as a signal that something is problematic in the conjugated verb.

Understanding the second discursive issue—that is, examining how interactants achieve intersubjectivity when there are no apparent problems in communication—entails taking the analytic focus away from investigating trouble sources. One way of doing this is to examine how utterances are designed to enhance comprehensibility. In dialogues, both the speaker and listener can design their talk and interaction in order to enhance comprehensibility. In most communicative situations, speakers are in a perpetual state of designing their talk according to the intended audience (Goodwin, 1979). This occurs at the most fundamental level of communication when a speaker uses the language of the recipient. At a more complex, microinteractional level, speakers design their talk in order to maintain meaningful communication. Speakers can speed up or slow down their speech (Miller, Grosjean, & Lomanto, 1984), carefully select or avoid words with special meaning (Stokoe & Edwards, 2007), strategically place stress and intonation (Couper‐Kuhlen & Selting, 1996), and raise or lower voice amplitude (Selting, 1994)—to name a few.

Listeners can also design their utterances in order to enhance comprehensibility in dialogues. Verbally, listeners do this by providing feedback while another interactant is speaking. These feedback cues usually come in the form of minimal verbalizations. For example, an “okay” or “mmhm” may signal to the speaker that an utterance has been understood, and at the same time serve the function of active listening (Yngve, 1970). In addition to signaling understanding, these minimal verbalizations also serve the interactional function of letting an interactant know whether or not he or she should continue speaking (Young & Lee, 2004). Therefore, listeners enhance intersubjectivity in dialogues at the content level—by displaying understanding (or nonunderstanding)—and at the interactional level—by taking part in the management of turns and floor contributions.