An investigation of Persian response signals from an interactive perspective
-
Soleiman Ghaderi
Abstract
Response signals (RS) have emerged as a powerful interaction tool, but they have yet to be fully understood. The current study analyzes 16 h of daily conversations using discourse-pragmatic frameworks to discuss certain aspects of the most prevalent primary and secondary Persian RSs. An RS is identified as a brief interactive response to a prior speaker’s statement, typically expressing (dis)confirmation, (un)acceptance, or backchannel (including assessment and continuer feedback). The research also differentiates and compares the functional and distributional differences and similarities between confirmation and backchannel signals. Following that, it takes a semasiological approach and discusses how the emergence, overlap, and markedness of certain functions for an item can be determined by the persistence of its original propositional meaning as well as the item’s grammaticalization and cooptation. The paper thus reviews the markedness of the backchannel function for na ‘no’ compared to this function’s development for ɂāre ‘yes’. Last but not least, cross-linguistic phonological tendencies, such as the integration of the phoneme /ɂ/ or /h/ in positive RSs and click sounds in negative ones, are supported by Persian RSs and their variants.
Acknowledgments
The research paper would not have been possible without the invaluable support and insights provided by Bernd Heine, Tania Kuteva, Kevin Tange, Mohammad Amouzadeh, and the editorial board members of Folia Linguistica, especially the Editor-in-Chief, Viviana Masia. I would also like to express my gratitude to Gunther Kaltenböck and Paul Ludwig for their insightful comments, which have helped to improve this study in many ways and have saved me from many errors. Any mistakes that remain are entirely my responsibility.
Appendix A: Abbreviations as well as phonetic notation
| Some glossing abbreviations | Phonetic notation | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| CLF COMP COP EZ IMP IMPS INDF IPFV OM PRS PST PC PL PN PP REL SBJV SG – = |
classifier complementizer copula ezāfe ‘addition’ imperative impersonal indefinite imperfective aspect object marker present tense past tense pronominal clitic plural pronoun past participle relative subjunctive mood singular morpheme boundary clitic boundary |
(.) (…) [ ] → ↑ ↓ CAPITALS (h) : underscoring ē ī ū |
a micropause or falling intonation a long pause shows speech overlaps. shows a sentence of particular interest. shows a rising or falling pitch louder or shouted words laughter in the conversation/speech indicates a stretched sound. indicates some form of prosodic stress. (long) /ɂi/ (long) /i/ (long) /u/ |
[Datasets]
Dādegān Corpus. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature, Tehran. Available at https://dadegan.apll.ir/ (last access 2 Feb 2023).
Mostafavi Kashani, Hossein. 2023. The Pārsīg Database. Ancient Iranian Studies, 1(1), 93–98. The database is Available at https://www.parsigdatabase.com/ (last access 22 Sept 2023).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Indexical meanings of the realization of /sˤ/ ص as [s] س in spoken and written Jordanian Arabic: a language change in progress?
- Nominalizations and its grammaticalization in standard Thai
- VOT in English by bilinguals with 2L1s: different approaches to voiceless and voiced stops
- An investigation of Persian response signals from an interactive perspective
- Another member out of the family: the description of manner of gait in Changana verbs of motion
- On the unified representation of continuity and discontinuity and its neurocognitive grounding
- Interaction and conventionalized expressions create the contexts for bleaching and constructional expansion: the case of GRAB
- The grammaticalization of the existential sign var in Turkish Sign Language: a Construction Grammar approach
- Morphological interpretations of syncretism in the panorama of Greek
- Book Reviews
- István Kecskés: The socio-cognitive approach to communication and pragmatics
- Jim Wood: Icelandic nominalizations and allosemy
- Carlos Acuña-Fariña: Syntactic processing: An overview
- Elly van Gelderen: The linguistic cycle: Economy and renewal in historical linguistics
- Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner: Discourse syntax: English grammar beyond the sentence
- Rong Chen: Toward a motivation model of pragmatics
- John W. Schwieter and Julia Festman: The cognitive neuroscience of bilingualism
