Doctoral Dissertation Research: A multi-modal account of turn-taking strategies

交互语言学反映了语言学对从日常自然语言中收集的数据和分析的日益增长的趋势。今天的语言学家没有研究人工发声，而是分析语言在现实世界中是如何发生的，以及由此带来的所有不流利。对任何对话的随意观察很快就会发现，演讲者很容易从一个对话切换到另一个对话，重叠或停顿相对较少。这表明了用于确定这些转换如何发生的底层系统。虽然已有大量研究使用英语数据，但涉及非语言成分的研究相对较少，而非语言成分已被证明对会话结构有显著影响。来自其他语言的数据甚至更少。即使在不同的英语中，会话特征也可能差异很大，导致沟通不畅；缺乏对其他语言的研究是有问题的。为了解决这种关于俄语的数据缺乏的问题，本论文研究了当代标准俄语使用者在对话过程中为协商话轮而使用的言语和手势策略。这是通过分析以单一语言为母语的人的诱导对话和自然对话并观察伴随话轮转换尝试的物理声音属性、所采用的句法结构以及相关的非语言行为，包括凝视、手势(包括点头、姿势转换和手势)来实现的，以回答以下问题：说话者如何使用句法、韵律和手势来协商俄语话轮转换？虽然分析的重点是交换话轮的特殊机制，但这个项目正在收集的信息还有各种更广泛的应用。作为对俄语会话结构的第一个多模式描述，研究结果将有助于俄语高级学习者以及外交和国家安全界需要广泛处理俄语或说英语的俄罗斯人的成员。通过识别相关的会话结构和谈判话轮的策略，该项目将帮助说英语的人了解俄罗斯人可能如何以及何时使用或期待一种不同的对话导航方法。此外，分析数据和公开可用的语料库将为研究提供丰富的新途径，包括自动语音生成和模式识别。鉴于对话作为互动单位的重要性，以及俄语作为一种全球语言的地位，其他应用的潜力是巨大的。

Interactional linguistics reflects a growing trend in linguistics for data and analyses gathered from everyday natural speech. Rather than investigating artificial utterances, linguists today are analyzing how language occurs in real-world situations, complete with all the disfluencies that this entails. A casual observation of any conversation quickly reveals that speakers easily alternate from one to the other with relatively few overlaps or pauses. This indicates an underlying system for determining how these transitions occur. While a great deal of research has been done with English data, there is relatively little that incorporates non-verbal components, which have been shown to have a significant effect on conversation structure. There is even less data from other languages. Even within varieties of English, conversation features can vary enough to cause miscommunication; the lack of research on other languages is problematic.In order to address this lack of data in regards to Russian, this dissertation research project examines the strategies, both verbal and gestural, that speakers of contemporary standard Russian employ in order to negotiate a speaking turn in the course of a conversation. This is accomplished by analyzing both elicited and natural conversations of monolingual native speakers and observing physical sound properties which accompany turn-taking attempts, the syntactic structures employed, and relevant non-verbal behavior including gaze, gestures, including nods, posture shift, and gesticulations in order to answer the question: how do speakers employ syntax, prosody, and gesture to negotiate turn-taking in Russian? While the analysis focuses on the particular mechanisms of exchanging turns, there are a variety of broader applications for the information this project is gathering. As the first multimodal account of Russian conversation structure, the results will help advanced learners of Russian and those members of the diplomatic and national security community who are required to deal extensively with the Russian language or with English-speaking Russians. By identifying the relevant conversation structures and strategies for negotiating turns, this project will help English speakers understand how and when Russians might be using or expecting a different method of navigating conversation. In addition, analyzed data and the publicly available corpus will provide a wealth of new avenues for research, including automated speech generation and pattern recognition. Given the importance of conversation as a unit of interaction and Russian's status as a global language, the potential for other applications are numerous.