An investigation of Persian response signals from an interactive perspective

Abstract

Response signals (RS) have emerged as a powerful interaction tool, but they have yet to be fully understood. The current study analyzes 16 h of daily conversations using discourse-pragmatic frameworks to discuss certain aspects of the most prevalent primary and secondary Persian RSs. An RS is identified as a brief interactive response to a prior speaker’s statement, typically expressing (dis)confirmation, (un)acceptance, or backchannel (including assessment and continuer feedback). The research also differentiates and compares the functional and distributional differences and similarities between confirmation and backchannel signals. Following that, it takes a semasiological approach and discusses how the emergence, overlap, and markedness of certain functions for an item can be determined by the persistence of its original propositional meaning as well as the item’s grammaticalization and cooptation. The paper thus reviews the markedness of the backchannel function for na ‘no’ compared to this function’s development for ɂāre ‘yes’. Last but not least, cross-linguistic phonological tendencies, such as the integration of the phoneme /ɂ/ or /h/ in positive RSs and click sounds in negative ones, are supported by Persian RSs and their variants.