The conversational use of reactive tokens in English, Japanese, and Mandarin

Patricia M. Clancy; Sandra A. Thompson; Ryoko Suzuki; Hongyin Tao

doi:10.1016/0378-2166(95)00036-4

The conversational use of reactive tokens in English, Japanese, and Mandarin

Patricia M. Clancy, Sandra A. Thompson, Ryoko Suzuki, Hongyin Tao

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

144 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper investigates 'Reactive Tokens' in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and English. Our definition of 'Reactive Token' (= 'RT') is 'a short utterance produced by an interlocutor who is playing a listener's role during the other interlocutor's speakership'. That is, Reactive Tokens will normally not disrupt the primary speaker's speakership, and do not in themselves claim the floor. Using corpora of conversational interactions from each of the three languages of our study, we distinguish among several types of RTs, and show that the three languages differ in terms of the types of RTs favored, the frequency with which RTs are used in conversation, and the way in which speakers distribute their RTs across conversational units.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	355-387
Number of pages	33
Journal	Journal of Pragmatics
Volume	26
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(95)00036-4
Publication status	Published - 1996 Sep
Externally published	Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics
Linguistics and Language
Artificial Intelligence

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