Competing for the floor towards a common goal: a focus on the functions of adversative markers in simultaneous sequences in BELF encounters

Valeria Franceschi

doi:10.1515/jelf-2024-2015

Article

Competing for the floor towards a common goal: a focus on the functions of adversative markers in simultaneous sequences in BELF encounters

Valeria Franceschi

Published/Copyright: April 7, 2025

Published by

Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Submit Manuscript Author Information Explore this Subject

From the journal Journal of English as a Lingua Franca Volume 13 Issue 2

Abstract

It is well established in Conversation Analysis (CA) that overlapping sequences are a common occurrence in spoken interactions. These often occur near Transition Relevance Places (TRP) in turn-taking management but are used also for cooperative and non-cooperative purposes. The former includes backchanneling and collaborative completion, whereas the latter involves competition for the floor, topic change, or expression of disagreement or strong opinions. This study aims to expand on existing investigations of cooperative and competitive overlaps in Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) interactions. The analysis was carried out on nine speech events of the Professional Business section of the VOICE corpus, focusing on simultaneous sequences including a number of selected pragmatic markers. A Conversation Analysis approach was adopted to analyze the resulting occurrences and identify the functions and purposes of overlaps in BELF communication. Findings show that overlaps may have multiple purposes, both cooperative (agreement, backchannelling, collaborative completion) and competitive, where disagreement is expressed and clarifications and corrections are made. Such overlaps, however, do not appear to be perceived as face-threatening by other participants, reinforcing the unmarked quality of disagreement and stance expression in high-stakes business interactions.

Abstract

È ormai consolidato nella Conversation Analysis (CA) che le sovrapposizioni dialogiche nelle interazioni orali siano un fenomeno comune. Esse si trovano spesso nei pressi di punti di rilevanza transizionale (PRT) nella gestione dei turni verbali, ma svolgono anche funzioni cooperative e non cooperative. Le prime includono backchannelling e co-costruzioni, le seconde competizioni di turno, cambi di argomento, espressioni di disaccordo o prese di posizione. Questo studio si propone di ampliare gli studi esistenti sulle sovrapposizioni nelle interazioni in inglese come lingua franca del business (BELF). L’analisi è stata condotta su 9 eventi comunicativi della sezione Professional Business del corpus VOICE, con un focus sulle sovrapposizioni, estratte automaticamente, che includono una selezione di marcatori pragmatici. Un approccio qualitativo è stato quindi adottato per analizzare le occorrenze e identificare le funzioni delle sovrapposizioni nella comunicazione BELF. L’analisi rivela che le sovrapposizioni giocano molteplici ruoli all’interno di queste interazioni, sia cooperative (espressione di accordo, backchannelling, co-costruzioni) che competitive (espressione di disaccordo e prese di posizione, correzioni e chiarimenti). Queste sovrapposizioni sembrano però non essere percepite come minaccia alla faccia dagli altri partecipanti, rinforzando quindi la funzione non marcata del disaccordo e dell’espressione di posizione in interazioni lavorative ad alto rischio.

Keywords: business English as a Lingua Franca; conversation analysis; disagreement; overlaps

Parole chiave: analisi conversazionale; business English as a Lingua Franca; disaccordo; sovrapposizioni

Corresponding author: Valeria Franceschi, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Verona, Lungadige Porta Vittoria 41, 37129 Verona, Italy, E-mail: valeria.franceschi@univr.it

Appendix: VOICE transcriptions conventions (adapted from VOICE Project 2007)

Note: not all markup elements in the corpus are reported in the paper.

<L1dut>: Tag signaling that a word is produced in the speaker’s L1. The language is specified.
?: Rising intonation
e:r: Lengthened sound
(.): Brief pause
(1): Longer pause, timed in seconds
<pvc>words</pvc>: Variation from native norms in terms of phonology, morphology or lexis. May indicate creations that do not exist in ENL.
@: Laughter
<1>words</1>: Overlapping speech
(words): Uncertain transcription
<un>xxx</un>: Unintelligible speech
{words}: Translation of non-English speech and contextual events
CAPS: Emphasis of a syllable or a word
=: Continuation/completion of speech by another speaker without pauses
.: Follows words pronounced with a falling intonation
<soft>words</soft>: Soft voice
<fast>words</fast>: Fast speaking
<spel> u s </spel>: Item spelled out
[org23]: Anonymization of organization names
[S1]: Anonymization of speakers’ names
te-: The hyphen indicates that a word is not produced in its entirety

References

Aijmer, Karin & Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen. 2004. A model and a methodology for the study of pragmatic markers: The semantic field of expectation. Journal of Pragmatics 36. 1781–1805. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2004.05.005.Search in Google Scholar

Alzahrani, Alaa A. 2020. Disagreement strategies used by speakers of English as a Lingua Franca in business meetings. Advances in Language and Literary Studies 11(3). 46–56. https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.11n.3p.46.Search in Google Scholar

Angouri, Jo. 2012. Managing disagreement in problem solving meeting talk. Journal of Pragmatics 44. 1565–1579. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.06.010.Search in Google Scholar

Angouri, Jo & Miriam A. Locher. 2012. Theorising disagreement. Journal of Pragmatics 44. 1549–1553. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.06.011.Search in Google Scholar

Bjørge, Anne K. 2012. Expressing disagreement in ELF business negotiations: Theory and practice. Applied Linguistics 33(4). 406–427. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams015.Search in Google Scholar

Björkman, Beyza. 2015. PhD supervisor-PhD student interactions in an English-medium Higher Education (HE) setting: Expressing disagreement. European Journal of Applied Linguistics 3(2). 205–229. https://doi.org/10.1515/eujal-2015-0011.Search in Google Scholar

Carnevale, Peter J. & Tahira M. Probst. 1998. Social values and social conflict in creative problem solving and categorization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(5). 1300–1309. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.74.5.1300.Search in Google Scholar

Cheung, Ching Ching & Kong Bieng Chuah. 2000. Intergroup conflict management framework for Hong Kong’s manufacturing industry. Engineering Management Journal 12(3). 26–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/10429247.2000.11415079.Search in Google Scholar

Choi, Kyoosang & Bongsoon Cho. 2011. Competing hypotheses analyses of the associations between group task conflict and group relationship conflict. Journal of Organizational Behavior 32. 1106–1126. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.733.Search in Google Scholar

De Dreu, Carsten K. W. & Laurie R. Weingart. 2003. Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology 88(4). 741–749. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.4.741.Search in Google Scholar

Dideriksen, Christina, Riccardo Fusaroli, Kristian Tylén, Mark Dingemanse & Morten H. Christiansen. 2019. Contextualizing conversational strategies: Backchannel, repair and linguistic alignment in spontaneous and task-oriented conversations. In Ashok K. Goel, Colleen M. Seifert & Christian Freksa (eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 261–267. Seattle: Cognitive Science Society.Search in Google Scholar

Ehrenreich, Susanne. 2009. English as a Lingua Franca in multinational corporations – Exploring communities of practice. In Anna Mauranen & Elina Ranta (eds.), English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and findings, 126–151. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholar Publishing.Search in Google Scholar

Fraser, Bruce. 1998. Contrastive discourse markers in English. In Andreas H. Jucker & Yael Ziv (eds.), Discourse markers: Descriptions and theory, 301–326. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Search in Google Scholar

Georgakopoulou, Alexandra. 2012. “A simple disagreement? A row? Or a massive fall out?”: On the challenges of an analytical task. Journal of Pragmatics 44. 1623–1625. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.07.004.Search in Google Scholar

Gülzow, Insa, Victoria Bartlitz, Milena Kuehnast, Felix Golcher & Dagmar Bittner. 2018. The adversative connectives aber and but in conversational corpora. Journal of Child Language 45(5). 1212–1226. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305000917000630.Search in Google Scholar

Hara, Kohei, Koji Inoue, Katsuya Takahashi & Tatsuya Kawahara. 2019. Turn-taking prediction based on detection of transition relevance place. Interspeech 2019. 4170–4174.Search in Google Scholar

House, Juliane. 2002. Developing pragmatic competence in English as a Lingua Franca. In Karlfried Knapp & Christiane Meierkord (eds.), Lingua Franca communication, 245–267. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Search in Google Scholar

Huang, Lan-Feng. 2019. A corpus-based exploration of the discourse marker well in spoken interlanguage. Language and Speech 62(3). 570–593. https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830918798863.Search in Google Scholar

Jefferson, Gail. 1978. What’s in a “Nyem”. Sociology 12. 135–139. https://doi.org/10.1177/003803857801200109.Search in Google Scholar

Jenks, Christopher J. 2012. Doing being reprehensive: Some interactional features of English as a lingua franca in a chat room. Applied Linguistics 33(4). 386–405. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams014.Search in Google Scholar

Kankaanranta, Anne & Leena Louhiala-Salminen. 2013. “What language does global business speak?” – The concept and development of BELF. Ibérica 16. 17–34.Search in Google Scholar

Kaur, Jagdish. 2009. English as a Lingua Franca: Co-constructing understanding. Saarbrücken: VDM-Verlag.Search in Google Scholar

Knapp, Karlfried. 2002. The fading out of the non-native speaker: A case study of uncooperative lingua franca communication. In Karlfried Knapp & Christiane Meierkord (eds.), Lingua franca communication, 217–244. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Search in Google Scholar

Komori-Glatz, Miya. 2018. “Cool my doubt is erased”: Constructive disagreement and creating a psychologically safe space in multicultural student teamwork. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 7(2). 285–306. https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2018-0012.Search in Google Scholar

Konakahara, Mayu. 2017. Interactional management of face-threatening acts in casual ELF conversation: An analysis of third-party complaint sequences. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 6(2). 313–343. https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2017-0015.Search in Google Scholar

Kurtić, Emina, Guy J. Brown & Bill Wells. 2013. Resources for turn competition in overlapping talk. Speech Communication 55. 721–774. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2012.10.002.Search in Google Scholar

Lerner, Gene. 1999. Collaborative turn sequences. In Gene Lerner (ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation, 225–256. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Search in Google Scholar

Louhiala-Salminen, Leena & Anne Kankaanranta. 2011. Professional communication in a global business context: The notion of Global Communicative Competence. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 54(3). 244–262. https://doi.org/10.1109/tpc.2011.2161844.Search in Google Scholar

Maíz-Arévalo, Carmen. 2014. Expressing disagreement in English as a lingua franca: Whose pragmatic rules? Intercultural Pragmatics 11(2). 199–224. https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2014-0009.Search in Google Scholar

Marra, Anton. 2016. Disagreement in business negotiations: A qualitative study of BELF usage in face-to-face business negotiations. Stockholm: University of Stockholm MA thesis.Search in Google Scholar

Mauranen, Anna. 2006. Signaling and preventing misunderstanding in English as lingua franca communication. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 177. 123–150. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.2006.008.Search in Google Scholar

Meierkord, Christiane. 2000. Interpreting successful lingua franca interaction. An analysis of non-native/non-native small talk conversations in English. Linguistik Online 5(1). https://doi.org/10.13092/lo.5.1013.Search in Google Scholar

O’Keeffe, Anne & Svenja Adolphs. 2008. Response tokens in British and Irish discourse: Corpus, context and variational pragmatics. In Klaus Schneider & Anne Barron (eds.), Variational pragmatics: A focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages, 69–98. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Search in Google Scholar

Osimk-Teasdale, Ruth, Hannes Pirker & Marie-Luise Pitzl. 2021. Search manual for VOICE 3.0 Online. https://voice.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/assets/content/en/pages/search-manual/Search-manual-VOICE-3.0-Online.pdf (accessed 20 December 2024).Search in Google Scholar

Pitzl, Marie-Luise. 2018. Transient international groups (TIGs): Exploring the group and development dimension of ELF. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 7(1). 25–58. https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2018-0002.Search in Google Scholar

Pomerantz, Anita. 1984. Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In Maxwell J. Atkinson & John Heritage (eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis, 57–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff & Gail Jefferson. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50(4). 696–735. https://doi.org/10.2307/412243.Search in Google Scholar

Santner-Wolfartsberger, Anita. 2015. Parties, persons, and one-at-a-time: Conversation analysis and ELF. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 4(2). 253–282. https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2015-0020.Search in Google Scholar

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1982. Discourse as an interactional achievement: Some uses of ‘uh huh’ and other things that come between sentences. In Deborah Tannen (ed.), Analyzing discourse: Text and talk, 71–93. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2000. Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language in Society 29. 1–63. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500001019.Search in Google Scholar

Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2003. A concept of “international English” and related issues: From “real English” to “realistic English”? Strasbourg: Council of Europe.Search in Google Scholar

Sifianou, Maria. 2012. Disagreements, face and politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 44. 1580–1590. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.03.009.Search in Google Scholar

Smith, Sara W. & Andreas H. Jucker. 2000. Actually and other markers of an apparent discrepancy between propositional attitudes of conversational partners. In Gisle Andersen & Fretheim Thorstein (eds.), Pragmatic markers and propositional attitudes, 207–237. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Search in Google Scholar

Toomaneejinda, Anuchit & Luke Harding. 2018. Disagreement practices in ELF academic group discussion: Verbal, nonverbal and interactional strategies. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 7(2). 307–332. https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2018-0016.Search in Google Scholar

VOICE. 2021. The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version VOICE 3.0 Online). Founding director: Barbara Seidlhofer; Principal investigators VOICE 3.0: Marie–Luise Pitzl, Daniel Schopper; Researchers: Angelika Breiteneder, Hans-Christian Breuer, Nora Dorn, Theresa Klimpfinger, Stefan Majewski, Ruth Osimk-Teasdale, Hannes Pirker, Marie-Luise Pitzl, Michael Radeka, Stefanie Riegler, Barbara Seidlhofer, Omar Siam & Daniel Stoxreiter. https://voice3.acdh.oeaw.ac (accessed 3 June 2022).Search in Google Scholar

VOICE Project. 2007. Mark-up conventions. VOICE transcription conventions [2.1]. https://voice.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/assets/content/en/pages/transcription-conventions/VOICE-mark-up-conventions.pdf (accessed 20 December 2024).Search in Google Scholar

Wolfartsberger, Anita. 2011. ELF business/business ELF: Form and function in simultaneous speech. In Alasdair N. Archibald, Alessia Cogo & Jennifer Jenkins (eds.), Latest trends in ELF research, 163–183. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2025-04-07

Published in Print: 2024-09-25

You are currently not able to access this content.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jelf-2024-2015

Keywords for this article

business English as a Lingua Franca; conversation analysis; disagreement; overlaps