Listening practices in English conversation: The responses responses elicit

This article describes listening practices in English conversation from an Emancipatory Pragmatics perspective, focusing on the role of the listener as a modality of action and seeking to evaluate linguistic behaviors like responses in terms of cultural assumptions about politeness, turn-taking, silence, and overlapping talk. In producing minimal response tokens, a listener signals a willingness to remain (predominantly) silent, to refrain from interrupting and to attend to the primary speaker, and thereby encourages the speaker to continue with a multi-unit turn. But even single word responses can have a significant effect on the trajectory of an extended turn by another speaker. Response tokens differ widely in their degree of obtrusiveness, such that some listener responses like uh-huh attract little or no attention to themselves and essentially never evoke a specific response of their own, while assessments like wow, on through signals of processing difficulty like oh, and challenges like so increasingly attract the attention of the primary speaker and elicit a response in their own right. This ranking in terms of obtrusiveness or insistency differs from other sub-classifications or scales so far described in the literature on listener responses.