Conveying Listenership Status Through Multiple duis in Mandarin Chinese Conversation

This study explores the use of multiple reactive tokens ( duis) in responsive turns in Mandarin, particularly in the sequential and interactional environments that project them in daily interactions. Data analysis of over 100 unscripted conversations between two or three native speakers indicate that an increase in the number of duis co-occurring corresponds to a higher level of listenership, resulting in a hierarchy of displayed stances ranging from neutral to active to affiliative. I argue that almost no practice of multiple duis in conversation is guaranteed to work mechanistically and automatically, as it requires at least a two-party collaboration. Multiple duis as reactive tokens in interaction are systematic, conversationally strategic, and sequentially as well as socially organized. Furthermore, they are recurrent patterns at the discourse level that must be recognized as routine practices in conversation, as their format can help accomplish unique interactional tasks that exhibit strong coherence and utility at the interactional level.

Other-repetitions in Mandarin Chinese

It is generally acknowledged that other-repetitions have various functions in daily conversation. However, no research has yet been done to explore the relationship between their functions and responses. This study sets out to bridge this gap by investigating the functions of other-repetitions in Mandarin Chinese conversations as well as the relationships between the functions and the responses. Adopting the method of conversation analysis, the study shows that other-repetitions may be accomplished by no response, minimal response, and expanded response, which are highly related with the functions that other-repetitions fulfil. Specifically, (i) for other-repetitions serving as reactive tokens to show listenership, alignment, and registering of receipt, no response is needed; (ii) for other-repetitions indicating recipients’ understanding of the previous utterance, a further confirmation or minimal response is generally needed; and (iii) for other-repetitions with a rising intonation or particular stress of certain words indicating recipients’ failure in understanding what is uttered, they will be accomplished by expanded responses.

Multi-modal sensing and analysis of poster conversations with smart posterboard

Conversations in poster sessions in academic events, referred to as poster conversations, pose interesting, and challenging topics on multi-modal signal and information processing. We have developed a smart posterboard for multi-modal recording and analysis of poster conversations. The smart posterboard has multiple sensing devices to record poster conversations, so we can review who came to the poster and what kind of questions or comments he/she made. The conversation analysis incorporates face and eye-gaze tracking for effective speaker diarization. It is demonstrated that eye-gaze information is useful for predicting turn-taking and also improving speaker diarization. Moreover, high-level indexing of interest and comprehension level of the audience is explored based on the multi-modal behaviors during the conversation. This is realized by predicting the audience's speech acts such as questions and reactive tokens.

Conversation, grammar, and fixedness

The categoriality of ‘adjectives’ has been a favorite topic of discussion in functional Chinese linguistics. However, the literature leaves us with no clear picture of the ‘adjective’ category for Mandarin. In this paper, we take a usage-based approach to revisit the issue of adjectives in Mandarin. Our investigation of a corpus of face-to-face conversations shows that conversational Mandarin favors Predicate Adjectives over Attributive Adjectives. This pattern is explained by two facts: people primarily use Predicate Adjectives in conversation to assess the world around them, and these assessments (including reactive tokens) are a primary way for people to negotiate stance, alignment, and perspective, while Attributive Adjectives are used to introduce new participants into the discourse, which is a less prominent function in everyday conversation. We also argue that whether predicative or attributive, an understanding of adjectives in everyday Mandarin talk involves various facets of fixedness. This is substantiated by the fact that predicate vs. attributive positions attract different types of adjectives, kinds of collocation patterns, kinds of constructions, and pathways to lexicalization. Thus, this paper demonstrates that (1) interactional data can tell us much about the ‘psychological reality’ of the category ‘adjective’ for speakers; and (2) frequency and ongoing prefab creation are crucial to characterizing the categoriality and mental representation of ‘adjectives’ in Mandarin.