Supportive Fellow-Speakers and Cooperative Conversations

This is a study of a specific type of everyday conversation whose essential hallmark is its participants' attempt to gain agreement and consent when establishing and maintaining a continuous and coherent flow of talk. Basing his analyses on the Survey'-corpus and resorting to an interpretative, reconstructive mode of description, Bublitz focusses on two main phenomena: (a) discourse topic and topical actions (like INTRODUCING and CHANGING A TOPIC or DIGRESSING from it), (b) hearer signals and reactive speaker contributions. The interlocutors' topic-centered and topic-organizing behaviour is shown to be predominantly and systematically oriented towards supporting their fellow-speakers to the extent that it seems to be justified to regard large parts of these conversations as having a monological character'.