Chapter published in:
The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González and J. Lachlan Mackenzie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 296] 2018
► pp. 171–197

“Okay … so … nice to meet you? {smiles}”

Openings in ELF Skype conversations

| Saarland University, Germany | Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany
| Saarland University, Germany | Trier University of Applied Sciences, Germany
The chapter examines discourse strategies used in conversation openings in CASE, the Corpus of Academic Spoken English (2018), containing English as a Lingua Franca conversations via Skype. Although there are similarities to telephone conversation openings, openings in CASE show differences in content and structure, accommodating the particular setup of Skype conversations and the computer-mediated discourse environment. The different sequences in Skype conversation openings are organized and negotiated cooperatively by participants. They are signalled by significant overuse of the following transition markers (TMs) between sequences: discourse markers, pauses and hesitation markers, laughter, repetitions, and lengthening. The quantitative analysis confirms that TMs occur significantly more often in transition zones between opening sequences than in both non-transition zones and openings as a whole.
Keywords: conversation openings, Skype, conversation organization, conversation sequence transitions, transition markers, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)
Published online: 20 September 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.296.07bru
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