Parvaneh Rezaee will be defending her dissertation on Monday, May 10 at 10:00 am HST over Zoom.
Zoom meeting link: https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/97578052588
Passcode: sls
Title: The Persian particle dige in professional-client interaction
Abstract: An extensive body of pragmatic and linguistic research deals with a group of connective expressions such as well, so, and now as discourse markers (DMs). These expressions can be used in different positions and with different functions, and they play diverse and important roles in discourse interpretation. DMs have been studied from the disciplinary perspectives of several language-related fields, including relevance theory, politeness theory, and discourse analysis (e.g., Aijmer, 2002; Fraser, 1996; Schiffrin, 1985, 1987, 2001; Schourup, 1999, 2011). In addition, a considerable literature examines DMs called discourse particles from the social-interactional perspective of conversation analysis across a variety of languages (Beach, 1993; Bolden, 2006, 2008; Hayano, 2011, 2013; Heritage, 2015; Kärkkäinen, 2003; Keevallik, 2010; Taleghani-Nikazm, 2015; Wu, 2004). However, research on discourse particles in natural interaction in Persian is very limited and it remains an understudied research topic. This study investigates how speakers of Persian deploy the particle dige as an interactional resource to manage face-to-face encounters between a professional and her clients in the institutional setting of a photo studio. The particle dige occurs frequently in Persian conversation, and it occurs in initial, medial, or final position, bearing different prosodic features within a turn and highlighting the saliency of particular conversational moves.
This study’s data come from 15 video and audio recorded photo selection sessions, each approximately 60–90 minutes long, for about 15 hours in total. The study employs conversation analysis (CA: Sidnell & Stivers, 2013), multimodal conversation analysis (Deppermann, 2013; Goodwin, 2000), and interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2018) to investigate how speakers of Persian deploy dige as an interactional resource to manage talk-in-interaction in the institutional setting. Specifically, it investigates the interactional work of dige in turn-medial position through the analysis of sequence organization and embodied action.
The findings of this study show that turn-medial dige occurs in second position in response to different focal actions such as requesting, seeking information, seeking confirmation, seeking assessment, proposing, and suggesting. The analysis shows that the particle dige occurs in interactional environments in which speakers claim epistemic primacy or authority that is rooted in their social or interactional roles (Stivers, 2005).
The findings also demonstrate that dige is used in turns that account for speakers’ prior turns. The participants of the study offer accounts with dige to avoid potentially problematic inferences of their prior turns or to claim responsibility for the possible accountability of their prior turns. The findings of this study are expected to be useful in the development of materials for teaching Persian as a foreign language. This study thus contributes to a large and rapidly growing literature on discourse markers as well as to research on integrating CA-based materials into the language classroom.