The comparative Study of Back Channel Response in Persian and English Telephone Conversation
Subject Areas : Research in Iranian classical literatureKeywords: back channel response telephone conversation speaker hearer ,
Abstract :
This research is aimed to study about back channel response in Persian and English telephone conversation comparatively in terms of measuring the frequency, type, function and position of it in the dialogue. The back channel response includes lexemes and phones such as “ya”, “really”, “Humm”, “mm”, … which are heard in the conversion repetitively in order to notify the speaker how his/her words are comprehended. In fact, the hearer reflects his/her position toward the speakers’ words through producing back channel response, as a result these signs have an impressive effect on the continuing the conversation. Despite the fact that back channel response exist in all the languages of the world, its function is different from one to another language. In general, the research data were extracted from a 300 minutes American English telephone conversation as well as 300 minutes Persian telephone conversation. The Persian data have received from Fars Dot telephone conversation database and took the permission from Gooyesh Pardaz Institute, while the English data have got from Vanarook research paper. The results of the study stand for a number of similarities and differences in frequency, function and position of back channel response in both English and Persian languages. Moreover, it is possible to illustrate how back channel response in Persian is more than English as they are 1691 and 1473 items respectively. The most frequent items in terms of their use were short back channel response, which were most likely represented in the end of the syntactic constituents. Furthermore, most of the back channel response items have an important effect on the comprehension process. However, there are more differences between the other forms and functions of back channel response in the Persian and English dialogues.