Decomposing Turns to Enhance Understanding by L2 Speakers

ABSTRACT

This study shows how multi-unit turns may be designed to facilitate incremental establishment of intersubjectivity in cases where understanding is at risk. In addressing L2 speakers, L1 speakers decompose their multi-unit turns into smaller units and present them one at a time, in “installments.” They leave a pause between each installment, thereby inviting the recipient to provide acknowledgments along the way, or alternatively, to initiate repair at an early stage. The practice may be used preemptively, to prevent potential problems of understanding from arising, or in response to an indication of an understanding problem by the recipient. The data are in Norwegian with English translation.

Notes

¹ The rather extended pauses occurring before the acknowledgements are related to the fact that the recipes are being written down.

² The research project responsible for the first corpus was reviewed and approved by the Norwegian Center for Research Data, whereas the second corpus was approved by the Regional Committees for Medical and Health Research Ethics. Written informed consent for the data to be published in this form was gathered from all participants.

³ Gestures are transcribed according to Kendon’s (2004) transcription conventions. See the appendix for the transcription key.

⁴ Syntactic completion is always just provisional and potential, since new constituents may be added incrementally (Auer, 1996). In fact, this happens twice in the previous cases—namely, in Excerpt 1, line 7 (“then it goes six hours every day, until December”) and Excerpt 2, line 1 (“and then you’ll come back here, for a new Norwegian test”).

⁵ Such general claims of nonunderstanding are rather rare, especially as a first try, see Svennevig (2008).

⁶ The nonstandard negative formulation of the question—asking whether the patients disagrees rather than agrees with his suggestion—may display the doctor’s interpretation of the patient’s unresponsiveness in this and previous sequences as passive resistance (see in-depth analysis in Landmark et al., 2017).

⁷ There is very little research on the functional aspects of Norwegian left-dislocation, but the account given in the Norwegian “reference grammar” (Faarlund, Lie, & Vannebo, 1997) is in line with what is found about English.

⁸ The corpus is audio recorded only, so the study does not say anything about the occurrence of nonverbal acknowledgements such as nods during the pauses.