Response Cries Inviting an Alignment: Finnish huh huh

ABSTRACT

This study looks at the use of the Finnish response cry huh huh as a device to invite an alignment and to assess joint physical experience. Response cries establish a speaker’s orientation to the world, but they also give cues for the recipient on how to respond to the responsive actions appropriately. While the meaning of huh huh is unproblematic for the recipients, both speakers and recipients orient to the vagueness of huh huh through their turn design and turn formulation. Of particular interest are those rare huh huh turns that are repeated by the receiver with prosodic upgrading or downgrading compared to the initial ones. Initiating a sequence with a response cry and repeating it in the second position prove to be effective devices for the participants to maintain social solidarity in physiologically or emotionally dense moments. The data are in Finnish with English translations.

Notes

¹ In addition, Fragment 1 outside the three corpora highlights some aspects of huh huh that are not found elsewhere in the data. All research participants in the HANS corpus have consented to the materials being used for research, and their real names have been replaced in the transcripts. In the VE and Poliisit data, an explicit decision was made not to acquire consent from the participants because (a) the access to the recordings does not require registration to the streaming service, (b) the participants appear in the data as public figures, and (c) this study is about practices rather than individual participants (Legewie & Nassauer, 2018).

² In Fragment 1, no huh huh was a response to the triggering event but as a part of a syntactical TCU construction.

³ The example also shows that speakers can manipulate the transition time between the triggering event and talk-in-interaction about that event. That is, while the reaction is assumedly imminent, the response can be delayed until a moment when talk becomes possible.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under grant numbers 285393 (University of Oulu) and 297053 (Tampere University).