The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes from several large corpora of spontaneous speech. The evidence shows that speakers monitor their speech plans for upcoming delays worthy of comment. When they discover such a delay, they formulate where and how to suspend speaking, which item to produce (uh or um), whether to attach it as a clitic onto the previous word (as in "and-uh"), and whether to prolong it. The argument is that uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just as they would any word.

Sounds like h-nmm, hh-aaaah, hn-hn, unkay, nyeah, ummum, uuh and um-hmuh -hm, occur in American English conversation but have thus far escaped systematic study. This article reports a study of both the forms and functions of these items, together with related tokens such as um and uh-huh, in a corpus of American English conversations. These sounds appear not to be lexical, in that they are productively generated rather than finite in number, and in that the sound-meaning mapping is compositional rather than arbitrary. This implies that English bears within it a small specialized sub-language which follows different rules from the language as a whole. This functions supported by this sub-language complement those of main-channel English; they include lowoverhead turn-taking control, negotiation of agreement, signaling of recognition and comprehension, management of interpersonal relations such as control and affiliation, and the expression of emotion, attitude, and affect.

Conversation coordinates joint activities and the joint projects that compose them. Participants coordinate (1) vertical transitions on entering and exiting joint projects; and (2) horizontal transitions in continuing within them. Transitions are coordinated using project markers such as uh-huh, yeah, right, and okay. In the authors’ proposal, participants use uh-huh, yeah, and right to continue within joint projects, and okay and all right to enter and exit them. This was examined in 2 telephone conversation corpora. Telephone conversations divide into an entry, body, and exit phase, each of which is a joint project. Okay and all right were used to transit from the entry to body and from body to exit, whereas uh-huh, yeah, and right were used within the body. JOINT PROJECTS IN CONVERSATION In conversation, the participants do not just speak—they do things together. These joint actions are normally the reason for their encounter, and their talk is shaped by the need to coordinate them. To understand what people are doing in conversation, one must understand the joint activities they are engaged in. Outside of conversation, individual and joint activities have long been analyzed into hierarchies of projects and subprojects (Cranach, Kalbermatten, Indermühle,

The way in which communicative intentions are mapped to language is a central problem in linguistic theory. This paper discusses this issue it relates to a little studied phenomenon, namely non-lexical conversational sounds (conversational grunts). The analysis is based primarily on examination of a few hundred occurrences, including such items as uh-huh, un-hn. um, mm, and oh, in a corpus of American English conversations, Th--e datncldesxtenslv phonetic variation, suggesting that these items are best explained, not as fixed words, but as dynamic creations. In particular, the vast majority of these items can be generated by a simple mode] consisting of 10 component sounds and 2 combining rules. Moreover. each of these component sounds seems to bear some meanlng or function wlich is fairly constant across grunts and across contexts; and so the meanings of conversational grunts arelargely a product of sound symbolism. This analysis is compatible with acoustic and cognitive properties of the conversational contexts in which grunts occur.

Turn-taking is usually considered to follow a simple set of rules, enacted through a perhaps more complicated system of signals. The most significant aspect of the turn-taking process is that, in most cases, it proceeds in a very smooth fashion. Speakers signal to each other that they wish to either yield or take the turn through syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic means. In this paper, I explore how the turn-taking process develops in two different sets of Spanish conversations. In the first group of conversations, speakers take turns spontaneously, presumably as they would do in everyday situations. In the second group, turns were mechanically controlled, and communication was one-way. A comparison of the two types of conversation provides insights into the signals used in spontaneous turn-taking.

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Adopting an eclectic analytic perspective of discourse analysis, conversation analysis and functional approaches, this study conducts an in-depth pragmatic analysis and describes the function of three pragmatic particles yani, işte and şey in casual, conversational Turkish. All three particles have multiple functions, which are described by reference to occurrences in utterances within three different domains of conversation. While utterance initial occurrences of yani are mainly connective and continuative, the utterance final placement of yani mainly acts as a situating particle with a strongly interactional nature. The utterance medial occurrences are basically ‘self-editing ’ whereby the speaker marks the clarification of a point in his/her prior talk. İşte mainly acts as a frame particle demarcating utterances as containing detailed, highlighted, and reported information as well as connecting distant pieces of utterances. The third particle şey basically marks the speaker’s temporary mental effort of extracting the linguistic information from the memory. In addition to its major role in repair organisation whereby marking its producer’s verbal planning and

A growing body of work has highlighted the challenges of identifying the stance a speaker holds towards a particular topic, a task that involves identifying a holistic subjective disposition. We examine stance classification on a corpus of 4873 posts across 14 topics on ConvinceMe.net, ranging from the playful to the ideological. We show that ideological debates feature a greater share of rebuttal posts, and that rebuttal posts are significantly harder to classify for stance, for both humans and trained classifiers. We also demonstrate that the number of subjective expressions varies across debates, a fact correlated with the performance of systems sensitive to sentimentbearing terms. We present results for identifing rebuttals with 63 % accuracy, and for identifying stance on a per topic basis that range from 54 % to 69%, as compared to unigram baselines that vary between 49 % and 60%. Our results suggest that methods that take into account the dialogic context of such posts might be fruitful. 1

The recent proliferation of political and social forums has given rise to a wealth of freely accessible naturalistic arguments. People can “talk ” to anyone they want, at any time, in any location, about any topic. Here we use a Mechanical Turk annotated corpus of forum discussions as a gold standard for the recognition of disagreement in online ideological forums. We analyze the utility of meta-post features, contextual features, dependency features and word-based features for signaling the disagreement relation. We show that using contextual and dialogic features we can achieve accuracies up to 68 % as compared to a unigram baseline of 63%. 1