Talking Back: "Small" Interactional Response Tokens in Everyday Conversation

Abstract

Because many studies of small talk (and talk in general) focus on the input of main speakers, the verbal behavior of listeners is often underrepresented in descriptions of interaction. The notion of small talk as talk superfluous to transactional exigencies enables us to encompass a variety of phenomena, including phatic exchanges, relational language, and various types of insertion sequence. This article adds to this range of phenomena by examining a set of high-frequency short listener response tokens that fulfill the criteria of being superfluous to transactional needs, of being focused on the interpersonal plane of discourse, and of having social functions that seem to overlap with those of phatic and relational episodes in different types of talk. Probably because the items involved are themselves "small" (in that their position is often difficult to locate on the cline from back-channels to full turns), their relational importance is easily overlooked.