Suspending and Reinstating Joint Activities With Dialogue

Bibliographic Data

ID11273213
AuthorsEric Chevalley (University of Neuchâtel, corresponding author), Adrian Bangerter (0000-0003-3622-1860)
Year2010
Volume47
Issue4
Pages263-291
Publication date2010-05-05
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueDiscourse Processes (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-853X • E-ISSN: 1532-6950
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01638530902959935
OpenAlexW1989405085
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited30

Interruptions are common in joint activities like conversations. Typically, interrupted participants suspend the activity, address the interruption, and then reinstate the activity. In conversation, people jointly commit to interact and to talk about a topic, establishing these commitments sequentially. When a commitment is suspended, face is threatened and grounding disrupted. This article proposes and tests a model for suspending and reinstating joint activities, using evidence from naturally occurring suspensions in the Switchboard corpus (Study 1) and from a laboratory experiment (Study 2). Results showed that long suspensions led to more politeness and more collaborative effort in reinstatement than short suspensions. Also, listeners were more polite than speakers in suspending joint activities. Overall, suspending and reinstating a joint activity was shown to be a collaborative task that requires coordination of both the topic and the participants' face needs

Commit · Conversation · Developmental psychology · Face (sociological concept · Joint (building · Joint attention · Linguistics · Politeness · Task (project management · Communication · Computer Science · Digital Communication and Language · Engineering · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Psychology · Social Psychology · Speech and dialogue systems

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