"Uh-huh. Mhm. Wow": How Backchannels influence the Story

Reproduced with permission: http://portermason.com/johnny/1998/01/26/credit-card-offer/

                                                     

When we hear someone telling a story or narrating an event, it is not uncommon to hear listeners responding with mhm, uh-huh, wow, oh, and the like. At face value, these words or short phrases may not seem to contribute to the conversation. Sure, they indicate attention and agreement, but how much do they actually influence the story being told? In a recent study on such responses, researchers Jackson Tolin and Jean E. Fox Tree argue that these backchannels, as they are called, actually do influence the narrative.

Tolin and Fox Tree obtained recordings of 30 conversations between undergraduate students. Conversations were 12 minutes in length and freely structured, but began with bad roommate experiences (because we all know complaints generate the best stories). Several relevant interactions were then extracted.

In their data, the authors distinguished between generic backchannels and specific backchannels. While both signal the attention of the listener, generic backchannels typically display comprehension and reception. Words like mhm and uh huh are considered generic backchannels: after using these, speakers often continued their story by providing new information. On the other hand, specific backchannels convey added information, showing the listeners' reaction to what was just said. Specific backchannels include oh my god, wow, and yeah. When a listener responded with a specific backchannel, the speaker was observed to then elaborate on whatever the listener was responding to.

The researchers then conducted an experiment using 20 short written dialogues from the data. These dialogues captured short narratives, but with an interesting twist—the parts after the backchannel were missing. Participants thus never knew what the storyteller said after the backchannel. The backchannels were also altered to be either generic or specific. Participants then guessed how the story would unfold by writing what they thought the storyteller would have said next.

Despite being unaware of the full original contexts of these recordings, the participants displayed some surprisingly consistent patterns. When a generic backchannel was presented, the participants were more likely to simply continue the story by presenting new information. To do so, they also used words such as well and so. However, when a specific backchannel was presented, participants were more likely to elaborate on the previous point in the story. They were also more likely to explicitly acknowledge the backchannel itself by saying things like yeah.

These differences show that participants actually perceive the backchannels to be important in determining their choice of what comes next. The backchannels therefore have a role in shaping the story telling. When you use a specific backchannel such as wow, you actually invite an elaboration, thereby steering the story, allowing the storyteller to add emphasis and elaboration. Accordingly, the type of backchannel gives a sense of predictability about what kind of information would follow it. This might make it easier for people to follow a particular conversation.

To conclude, backchannels are not simply passive, but do actively influence the outcome of =storytelling. For example, the researchers suggested that audiences who provide less specific backchannels could result in a storyteller telling a... well... boring story. So perhaps if you get bored by someone carrying on and on, you might like to try a specific backchannel every once in a while!

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 Tolins, Jackson and Fox Tree, Jean E. (2014) Adressee backchannels steer narrative development. Journal of Pragmatics 70: 152-164.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.06.006

This summary was written by Darren Hum Chong Kai

Who said that? Zero/null quotatives to introduce speech.

The quotative system, particularly in teenage speech, has received a lot of attention from linguists in recent years (for other summaries related to this topic click ‘Quotatives’ in the left-hand bar). Much of the research has focused on the frequency rates and the linguistic contexts in which reporting verbs such as SAY, GO and THINK are used, with many studies focusing on the more recent newcomer BE LIKE, which has emerged among English varieties across the globe.

A further competitor within the quotative system, however, is the ‘zero’ or ‘null’ quotative, which is the focus of a study by Ignacio M. Palacios Martinez. These are instances where direct speech is introduced without the use of any introductory verb or attributed speaker. Palacios Martínez provides the following example where Speaker A introduces direct speech without any introductory verb (Ø = zero quotative) but the context and the mimicking voice provide Speaker B with the clue that these are the words of the male protagonist of the film being discussed:

A:       And I’m gonna go and see Sommersby.

B:       <unclear>

A:       Sommersby with Jodie Foster and Richard Gere.

B:       Oh yeah

A:       <mimicking> Ø ‘I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you!’

Palacios Martínez compared the speech of Spanish (mainly from Madrid) and English (mainly from London) teenagers from similar social backgrounds and found that zero quotatives represented 8% and around 18% respectively of all quotatives used, demonstrating that it is a robust competitor within these quotative systems.

Furthermore, the Spanish and English teenagers were found to use zero quotatives in similar ways. The first main context identified as favoring the use of a zero quotative was when a sound or non-lexicalised word was used, as in ‘grrr, grrr, grrr’ to provide a listener with an animal sound when telling a story about a bear.

The second main use of zero quotatives was connected with mimicking a voice (as in the above example) or performing in a new voice, for example for dramatic or humorous effect. Within this category, Palacios Martinez found that the teenagers imitated a wide variety of accents, including African, Jamaican, Chinese, French and Swedish, usually done to criticize or make fun of another person or to sound funny and make their interlocutor laugh. The teenagers also emulated famous people or used voices typical of babies or young children.

An interesting use of the zero quotative was, as Palacios Martínez describes it, to express disgust and disagreement with an interlocutor. He provides an example of a girl repeating a disagreement that she had with a boy in her class about a football team, where she repeats what the boy says and what she says in return but without the overt use of an introductory verb in the case of either speaker.  The fact that conflicting views are presented seems to make it clear that different people are being represented in the narrative.

An interesting observation made by Palacios Martínez is that the more involved a narrator becomes with his/her story and as the story becomes more dramatic, the more likely is the use of explicit quotatives to be abandoned and zero quotatives used. This is perhaps also connected to the fact that as a story progresses the listener comes to know the characters involved and there is not such a need for overt dialogue introducers.

To conclude, Palacios Martínez argues that zero quotatives play an important role in the speech of teenagers, particularly in the construction of their narratives, suggesting that this may be connected to the fact that teenagers are more prone to imitating and mimicking others than adults. He argues that the lack of overt quotatives serves to make the narrative account more fluid and thus also involves the interlocutor more directly.

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Palacios Martínez, Ignacio M. (2013). Zero quoting in the speech of British and Spanish teenagers. A contrastive corpus-based study. Discourse Studies 15(4): 439-462.

DOI: 10.1177/1461445613482431

This summary was written by Sue Fox

(Re)telling Stories

 

Have you ever been in a position where a person has told you a story about something that has happened to them and then you hear that same person telling the same story to someone else? You might have thought to yourself, “Hmm…that’s not the way I heard it”. That’s because it seems that our stories change according to who we are telling and what we are trying to achieve in that particular interaction.

We all tell stories in our everyday conversations. Typically, the teller of a story gives a report of an event in its chronological order to one or more recipients. In doing so, the teller performs some kind of social action be it boasting, providing an explanation, complaining or apologising among other things. It is also well known that we modify our stories according to our audience and this is manifested in such ways as topic selection, word choice, how we open and close sequences and in the ordering of sequences themselves. When we are telling a story to several people at once we also modify the telling of the story to take into account the recipients’ knowledge of the reported event. But what resources does a teller draw on when telling the same story at different times and to different recipients who have varying degrees of knowledge and perhaps opposing perspectives on the reported event?

This is what Maarit Niemelä and Mirka Rauniomaa have been investigating. In examining how one person tells the same story over a series of telephone calls to three different recipients they examine some of the features that change according to who the recipient of the story is. They also analyse what ‘stance’ the interlocutors take, in other words how the interlocutors portray themselves and others in a certain light in view of the subject matter at hand.

The case they analyse involves a young man who makes three phone calls on the same day to three different people. He tells each recipient about the trouble he’s been having with his computer monitor. The receiver of the call is already aware or is explicitly made aware during the call that the monitor had broken down and had been taken to the warranty service some time ago. Having got the monitor back from the warranty service, the young man had reconnected it and used it for a short time but it had broken down again.

The researchers show that in each (re)telling some essential parts of the story remain constant, for example the order in which things happened and the highlight of the story which is that the monitor has broken down for a second time. However, other things that are less constant such as the evaluations and the degree of detail in the telling are shaped by the teller’s stance, the reason for the call and the relationship between the teller and the recipient. In all three cases the story might be categorised as a ‘troubles-telling’ story but in the first call to a law student friend the storyteller not only vents his frustration by using the expression ‘now I’m pissed off’ but also uses the call as a request for legal advice with the use of ‘you being a lawyer and all’ and ‘can you give me any advice’. The second call is to a flat-mate and again the teller displays his irritation with the use this time of ‘I’m so shattered’ but this call is considered to be for the purpose of providing information to someone who may be affected by the events by his use of ‘I just realized that I didn’t call you yet’. The third call is to someone that the storyteller seems to be more familiar with and who seems to be a fellow computer game-player. Again, the venting of feelings is explicit as in ‘bloody hell my computer monitor broke down again’ and ‘I’m calling like really angry’ but this time the call seems to be for the purpose of soliciting sympathy as shown in expressions such as ‘I need comforting right now’ and ‘this is so unfair’.

By examining how stories get retold on multiple occasions the researchers have shown that a teller modifies the story in order to accomplish certain social actions and that individual features of the (re)tellings are designed with the recipient in mind and will depend on such things as the type of relationship between the teller and recipient and the shared knowledge they have about the events. So remember that when someone tells you a story it is rarely just a simple reporting of events!

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 Niemelä, M. and Rauniomaa, M. (2010). Mobilizing

 (Re)tellings of a Story to Accomplish Multiple Social Actions.                                    

  SKY Journal of Linguistics 23:227-264.

This summary was written by Sue Fox