Backchannels are a linguistic phenomenon that remains poorly defined. Borrowing of terminology and a reliance on axiomatic definitions has resulted in a diverse nomenclature and an indeterminate inventory of forms. Further, research concentration on backchannels produced in northern hemisphere English has led to the assumption of a common repertoire across all varieties, without supporting empirical investigation. This investigation analysed transcriptions of telephone conversations drawn from the Australian and New Zealand sub-corpora of the International Corpus of English (ICE), and used the ICE corpus mark-up scheme to select potential targets. Chi-square analyses found listeners used single word backchannels more often than more elaborate forms; and Australian listeners produced more backchannels and more single forms. These findings were compared with reported usage by US English listeners, showing that while listeners worldwide draw from a common repertoire of backchannel forms, they differ in the complexity of the structures they use.
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Barron, Anne & Emily Black
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Peters, Pam & Deanna Wong
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Norrick, Neal R.
2012. Listening practices in English conversation: The responses responses elicit. Journal of Pragmatics 44:5 ► pp. 566 ff.
Wong, Deanna, Steve Cassidy & Pam Peters
2011. Updating the ICE annotation system: tagging, parsing and validation. Corpora 6:2 ► pp. 115 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph
2010. Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study. Journal of English Linguistics 38:1 ► pp. 56 ff.
Rühlemann, Christoph
2012. Conversational Grammar. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,
Rühlemann, Christoph
2017. Integrating Corpus-Linguistic and Conversation-Analytic Transcription in XML: The Case of Backchannels and Overlap in Storytelling Interaction. Corpus Pragmatics 1:3 ► pp. 201 ff.
2008. An analysis of corpus-based research on TEFL and applied linguistics.. English Teaching 63:2 ► pp. 283 ff.
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