Social Interaction
Functions
Making Conversations Work
COHERENCE
• Interpretive Strategies
• Etc. Principal: Willingness to fill in the meaning of ambiguous language
• Assumption of Relevance: assume what is said is relevant to what has been
said before
• Retrospective-Prospective Sense of Occurrence: use of present or future
utterances to interpret past or present remarks
• Role Taking: mentally take the others position
•
Local Management of Talk
“Elementary Devices”
• Turn taking, reference to previous statements, paraphrases,
conjunctions
• Alignment Moves
• Motive talk: “Now the reason Why I did that . . .”
• Disclaimers: “I haven’t read much in that area but .”
• Accounts: “I did poorly on the exam but you see my roommate ... “ (power,
rights, obligation, situation)
• Structuring Moves
• Quid Pro Quo: make concession to gain compliance
• Change Procedure: “We’ll bring it up later…”
• Fractionation: Break into workable segments
Continuity and Coherence
• Link to previous utterance - seen as competent
– extend theme, global topic best
– event extensions when ambiguous
• Synchrony Occurs in
– Vocal parameters (duration, speech latencies, articulation rate, precision, accent, rate)
– interacts with judgments (attraction, stuttering, perceived warmth, expectations,
perceived intelligence, perceived competence, perceived agreement)
– Within an individual (Body movements)
– Between speaker and listener
– Content Synchrony
VERBAL AND
NONVERBAL
BEHAVIORS
ACCOMPLISHING
SELECTED
INTERACTION
FUNCTIONS
• Close interpersonal
distances
• Reciprocal touch
• Direct body orientation
• Mutual gaze
• Forward lean
• Postural openness
• Verbal intimacy
• Personal resource
exchange
• Facial Expressiveness
Intimacy:
Reinforcement (positive)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Direct body orientation
Speech convergence
Positive head nods
Postural convergence
Friendly touch
Gestural convergence
Positive back-channel responses
Reciprocal self-disclosures
Praise; Smiles
Gaze at the other
Relatively long talk duration
Impression Management
• Moderate to fast speech rates
• Speech convergence
– Moderate to long talk duration
• Smiles, Forward lean
• Positive head nods
• Appropriate self-disclosure
• Few and brief pauses (unless topic is
highly intimate)
• Speech with little or few disfluencies
• Prestigious or similar (to the
interlocutor) Accents, Gestures; Lexical
diversity
Control
• Turn-yielding cues
– Terminate Gestures
– Completion of a grammatical
clause
– Sociocentric sequences such as
“you know” and “but-ah”
– Decrease in pitch or loudness at
end of sociocentric sequence
– Prolonging the last syllable in a
clause
– Change in pitch of the last work
of a clause
– Asking a Question
– Turn suppressing cues
Control, Cont.
• Turn Taking Sequences
– Head shifts away from the
speaker
– Gesturing
– Overloudness of Speech
– Audible Inhalation
Persuasion
• Gazing at target
• Lexical diversity
• Increasing loudness
• Dialect similarity
• Moderate to fast
speech rates
• Gestural matching
• Facial
expressiveness
Dominance and Power:
• Gazing at listener when talking
• Interruption
• Gazing away while listening
• Long floorholding
• Non-reciprocal touch
• Lexical style shifts
• Lack of facial expressiveness
• Moderately loud speech (when vying for dominance)
• Relaxed Posture
• Control-acquiescence speech act sequences