Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1989. 19/3. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 19)

M. Deli, Ágnes: On the functions of Oack-ChanneLing

- 21M. DELÍ, ÁGNES ON II IE FUNCTIONS OF BACK-CHANNELLING* Discourse studies, the survey of the spoken language, have attracted the attention of an increasing number of linguists during the past few decades. Verbal communication has been investigated from various angles by psycholinguists, socioinguists and other scholars dealing with human behaviour, as well as language teachers. In this paper some of the listener's verbal reactions to statements will be examined in natural conversation. For advice and suggestions I owe thanks to my supervisor, Dr. László Bódai; toi Dr. Judit Zerkowitz and Nicholas Tayler, who read my paper. "A Corpus of English Conversations" edited by Jan Svartvik and Randolph . Quirk (1980) has been employed during the research. This is a large collection of non-edited English conversations available in transcriptions as well as on computer tape. Ttie material provided in this paper follows the original except that the markings of certain voice characteristics as "booster" have been removed as the phonetic aspects of back-channelling are out of the scope of this study. Left in, though, are the following symbols:, , 5.1.2. A, B, a, c > A * and + text number speakers speaker identity: speaker continues where he left off overlapping talk * This paper is part of a report on my research into discourse financed by the Hungarian Ministry of Education.