Social Interaction Functions

1. Social Interaction Functions Making Conversations Work

2. COHERENCE • Interpretive Strategies • Etc. Principal: Willingness to fill in the meaning of ambiguous language • Assumption of Relevance: assume what is said is relevant to what has been said before • Retrospective-Prospective Sense of Occurrence: use of present or future utterances to interpret past or present remarks • Role Taking: mentally take the others position

3. Local Management of Talk • “Elementary Devices” • Turn taking, reference to previous statements, paraphrases, conjunctions • Alignment Moves • Motive talk: “Now the reason Why I did that . . .” • Disclaimers: “I haven’t read much in that area but .” • Accounts: “I did poorly on the exam but you see my roommate ... “ (power, rights, obligation, situation) • Structuring Moves • Quid Pro Quo: make concession to gain compliance • Change Procedure: “We’ll bring it up later…” • Fractionation: Break into workable segments

4. Continuity and Coherence • Link to previous utterance - seen as competent • extend theme, global topic best • event extensions when ambiguous • Synchrony Occurs in • Vocal parameters (duration, speech latencies, articulation rate, precision, accent, rate) • interacts with judgments (attraction, stuttering, perceived warmth, expectations, perceived intelligence, perceived competence, perceived agreement) • Within an individual (Body movements) • Between speaker and listener • Content Synchrony

5. VERBAL AND NONVERBAL BEHAVIORS ACCOMPLISHING SELECTED INTERACTION FUNCTIONS

6. Intimacy: • Close interpersonal distances • Reciprocal touch • Direct body orientation • Mutual gaze • Forward lean • Postural openness • Verbal intimacy • Personal resource exchange • Facial Expressiveness

7. Reinforcement(positive) • Direct body orientation • Speech convergence • Positive head nods • Postural convergence • Friendly touch • Gestural convergence • Positive back-channel responses • Reciprocal self-disclosures • Praise; Smiles • Gaze at the other • Relatively long talk duration

8. Impression Management • Moderate to fast speech rates • Speech convergence • Moderate to long talk duration • Smiles, Forward lean • Positive head nods • Appropriate self-disclosure • Few and brief pauses (unless topic is highly intimate) • Speech with little or few disfluencies • Prestigious or similar (to the interlocutor) Accents, Gestures; Lexical diversity

9. Control • Turn-yielding cues • Terminate Gestures • Completion of a grammatical clause • Sociocentric sequences such as “you know” and “but-ah” • Decrease in pitch or loudness at end of sociocentric sequence • Prolonging the last syllable in a clause • Change in pitch of the last work of a clause • Asking a Question • Turn suppressing cues

10. Control,Cont. • Turn Taking Sequences • Head shifts away from the speaker • Gesturing • Overloudness of Speech • Audible Inhalation

11. Persuasion • Gazing at target • Lexical diversity • Increasing loudness • Dialect similarity • Moderate to fast speech rates • Gestural matching • Facial expressiveness

12. Dominance and Power: • Gazing at listener when talking • Interruption • Gazing away while listening • Long floorholding • Non-reciprocal touch • Lexical style shifts • Lack of facial expressiveness • Moderately loud speech (when vying for dominance) • Relaxed Posture • Control-acquiescence speech act sequences