Work Package 5: Role of phonetic convergence in conversational interaction

The work carried out in this section is concerned with the function of phonetic convergence as a communicative strategy in social interaction. Our analyses concentrate on verbal repetitions (the verbatim reproduction of a previous speaker's fragment of utterance of various length), a recurrent phenomenon in conversation. Using the CLAPI and CID databases, an inventory of the pragmatic roles that repetitions may fulfill (and which include repairs, assessments, regulations, and confirmation requests) is made. On the basis of an extended corpus of repetitions, constituted by means of the tools and of the corpora available on the CLAPI data bank, we want to identify specific environments for repetitions and specific actions accomplished through repetitions. Moreover, we are looking for describing the various linguistic and multimodal resources methodically exploited by participants to achieve both identification and differentiation between other-repeated lexical forms.