Managing the Boundary Between “Yes” and “But”: Two Ways of Disaffiliating With German ja aber and jaber

Abstract

This study shows how different phonetic productions of the same word pair perform different actions in conversation. The German words for “yes” and “but” share the same vowel at the word boundary: ja aber. Data from naturally occurring talk show that German speakers exploit this property of their language to differentiate between ja aber and jaber. The phonetic distinction co-occurs with a distinction in how actions are formatted. In ja aber turns, ja performs a separate action, often as a second pair part, providing an elicited confirming response. The action initiated by aber is typically disaffiliative and done for the first time. In contrast, jaber-fronted turns are rarely second pair parts and perform one single disaffiliative action, which is a redoing of a previously accomplished or attempted action. The frequent occurrence of jaber in the corpus suggests that the item is being used as a wordlike entity similar to a discourse marker. The findings reveal that for participants the local requirement to manage action boundaries is more relevant than linguistic word boundaries that may exist outside the interactional context. Data are in German with English translation.

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