Echoing in Japanese conversations

Abstract

The study reported in this paper focuses on different functions of echoing in Japanese dialogues. Echoing is defined as a speaker's lexical repeat of (parts of) an utterance spoken by a conversation partner in a previous turn. The phenomenon was investigated in three task-oriented, informal dialogues. Repeats in this corpus were labelled in terms of whether or not the speaker had integrated the other person's utterance into hislher own body of knowledge. The investigation brought to light that the level of integration is reflected in a number of lexical and prosodic correlates. These features are discussed regarding their information potential, i.e., their accuracy and comprehensiveness as signals.