Carlson Lauri. Well in Dialogue Games: A Discourse Analysis of the Interjection ‘well’ in Idealized Conversation

John Benjamins, 1984. — viii, 104 pages. — (Pragmatics & Beyond). — ISBN: 90-272-2539-7 / 0-915027-27-5.The main theoretical interest of the topic lies in a tradeoff relation between a hypothesis and background theory. Data presented here and in other studies exhibit well in a wide variety of natural and more or less conventional contexts of use. To cover this variety, several general characterizations or rules have been suggested. Not surprisingly, we find that the more cases these descriptions cover, the less informative they tend to become by themselves, and the more involved arguments are needed to derive the special cases from the general rule. At the same time, any extra information involved in the particular uses must be located elsewhere, in assumptions about the particular contexts of use and in other rules of conversation.Aims
Idealizations
Chapter outlines
Theory
Dialogue games
Conversational analysis
Computational models of dialogue
Goal-directedness
Modeling beliefs
Current focus of dialogue
Rules of dialogue shared by participants
Earlier Treatments of Well
Lakoff (1973a)
Murray (1979)
Svartvik (1980)
Owen (1981)
The Present Treatment
The hypothesis
Development of the hypothesis
Data and classification
Criteria pertaining to dialogue structure
Utility related criteria
How many meanings?
Well as a Qualifier
Question-answer exchanges
Dialogue internal qualifications
Other exchanges
Replies
Arguments
Corrections
Comments
Exclamations
Topic suggestions
Well as a Frame
Opening a dialogue
Transition situations
Preparatory moves
Topic shift
Turn taking
Closing
Turn internal cases
Contrastive Studies
Well vs. oh
(D.oh)
Exclamation
Replies
Unexpected topic
Disappointment
Topic shift
Welland Finnish no
Schourup (1983)
Theory and methodology
Hypothesis
Exclamations
Topic shifting
Answers
Before questions
Corrections
Extensions
Politeness
Emotions
Well in writing