Synopses & Reviews
This book systematically investigates the sequential deployment of responses to requests in telephone service encounters in British English, German and Italian.Varcasia describes and defines conversational strategies used by speakers of the three languages when responding to requests, considering the different response formats and their grammatical configuration. Chapters are organised according to the structural complexity in the responses and explore the different practices of turn-construction. This cross-cultural comparison recognises the similarities and differences in the preference for response format and reveals that speakers in all three languages oriented to the same expectations of detailed responses involving extended conversation rather than short responses that provided only the requested information. This book will appeal to scholars of linguistics and communication studies as well as having practical implications for the training of staff and call-centre operators.
Review
To come
Synopsis
This book considers the sequential deployment of the receiver's response to the caller's request in telephone service encounters between native speakers in the U.K, Germany and Italy analysing the different response formats and their grammatical configuration.
About the Author
Cecilia Varcasia is a Research Fellow at the Language Study Unit of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. Her research focuses on multilingual communication, discourse and conversation analysis, cross-cultural pragmatics, corpus linguistics and language testing. She has edited Becoming Multilingual (2011), and co-edited Corpora, Discourse and Style (2009).
Table of Contents
List of Tables and Figures
Glossary
Transcription Conventions System
Introduction
1. Theoretical Framework
2. Data and Methodology
3. Simple Response Format to the Request
4. Response Plus Extension
5. Insertion Sequence Followed by the Response
6. The Caller Leads the Conversation
7. The Different Response Formats at One Glance
8. Service Encounters and Call Centre Training Implications
9. Conclusions and Implications
References
Appendix