Article published in:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 8:1 (2017) ► pp. 129–153

Aligning caller and call-taker

The opening phrase of Dutch emergency calls

| University of Groningen | University of the Witwatersrand
| Utrecht University

This paper reports on conversation analytic research for the Dutch national emergency call-centre. In a corpus study of 120 emergency calls we show that callers’ orientations to their communicative tasks are not aligned to the institutional communicative tasks of the call-takers. In a subsequent workplace experiment involving over 2000 calls, it appeared that the use of an alternative question rather than a wh-question, significantly altered callers’ emergency deliveries and adapted them to call-takers’ communicative needs. The analysis shows two aspects of callers’ responses to the different question formats: (i) The alternative questions produced significantly more type-conforming answers than the wh-questions, and also (ii) callers treated their non-conforming answer to alternative question more often as dispreferred than their non-conforming answers to wh-questions. Callers thus treated the preference for type-conformity to be stronger for alternative questions than for wh-questions.

Keywords: emergency calls, conversation analysis, applied conversation analysis, type-conformity, preference organization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • Emergency call organization
  • 2.Emergency calls and questions
  • 3.Data and methods
    • Conversation Analysis
    • Measuring effectiveness
  • 4.What makes a call long?
    • What is a ‘long’ call?
    • Why are calls long?
  • 5.A new opening phrase
    • Results of the experiment
    • Type-conforming answers of wh-questions and alternative questions
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 25 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.8.1.07koo
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Aligning caller and call-taker
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