Abstract
While greetings are performed in all cultures and open most conversations, previous studies suggest that there are cross-cultural differences between different languages in greeting behavior. But do speakers of different national varieties of the same language organize and perform their greeting behavior in similar ways? In this study, we investigate the sequential organization of greetings in relation to gaze behavior in the two national varieties of Swedish: Sweden Swedish spoken in Sweden and Finland Swedish spoken in Finland. In recent years, the importance of studying pluricentric languages from a pragmatic perspective has been foregrounded, not least within the framework of variational pragmatics. To date, most studies have focused on structural differences between national varieties of pluricentric languages. With this study, we extend the scope of variational pragmatics through adding an interactional, micro perspective to the broader macro analysis typical of this field. For this study, we have analyzed patterns for greetings in 297 video-recorded service encounters, where staff and customers interact at theatre box offices and event booking venues in Sweden and Finland. The study shows that there are similarities and differences in greeting behavior between varieties. There is a strong preference for exchanging reciprocal verbal greetings, one at a time, in both. There is also a similar organization of the greeting sequence, where customer and staff establish mutual gaze prior to the verbal greetings, thus signaling availability for interaction. The duration of mutual gaze and the timing of the greeting, however, differ between the two varieties. We have also conducted a multi modal analysis of gaze behavior in correlation to the greeting. We found that the customers and staff in the Finland Swedish data share mutual gaze before and during the verbal greeting, and often avert gaze after the verbal greetings. However, in the Sweden Swedish data, the participants often avert gaze before the verbal greetings. Our results thus indicate that both similarities and differences in pragmatic routines and bodily behavior exist between the two national varieties of Swedish. The present study on greeting practices in Finland Swedish and Sweden Swedish should contribute to the field of variational pragmatics and to the development of pluricentric theory.
About the authors
Jenny Nilsson is reader/associate professor in Nordic Languages and researcher at the Institute for Language and Folklore in Sweden. Her research interests include interactional sociolinguistics, cross-cultural pragmatics, interactional linguistics as well as language variation and change. She is one of the chief investigators in the research programme Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages – Communicative Patterns in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish. Address for correspondence: Institute for Language and Folklore, Department of Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research, Gothenburg, Vallgatan 22, SE-411 16 Gothenburg, Sweden. E-mail: jenny.nilsson@sprakochfolkminnen.se
Stefan Norrthon is a PhD-student at the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism at Stockholm University. His research interests include sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis and multimodality. Address for correspondence: Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Email: stefan.norrthon@su.se
Jan Lindström is professor of Scandinavian languages at the University of Helsinki and leader of a research team in the Finnish Center of Excellence in Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction. His research concentrates on spoken language (Swedish) from the perspective of interactional linguistics, grammatical theory, cross-language comparison, language contact, historical pragmatics and language policy. He is currently one of the chief investigators in the research programme Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages – Communicative Patterns in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish. Address for correspondence: Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, Helsinki University, P.O. Box 24, 00014 Helsinki, Finland. E-mail: jan.k.lindstrom@helsinki.fi.
Camilla Wide is professor of Scandinavian Languages at the University of Turku. In her research, she focuses primarily on grammar in spoken interaction and variation from different perspectives. She is currently one of the chief investigators in the research programme Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric languages – Communicative Patterns in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish. Address for correspondence: University of Turku/Scandinavian Languages, 20014 University of Turku, Finland. E-mail: camilla.wide@utu.fi.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the participants at the seminar Language, Interaction, and Social Organization (LISO) at University of California, Santa Barbara and the participants of the panel Entry and re-entry into interaction at the International Pragmatics conference in 2017. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editor, Istvan Kecskes, for valuable comments on a previous version.
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Appendix
Transcription symbols. The conventions for multimodal transcription are from Mondada (2014 [2001]) and adapted to this study.
- ,
level intonation
- ¿
slightly rising intonation
- [
point of overlap onset
- ]
point where overlapping talk stops
- =
“latching”, i.e. no silence between two adjacent utterances
- (.)
micropause, less than 0.2 seconds
- ((0.5))
silences timed in tenths of a second
- (0.5)
elapsed time between embodied actions
- va:
lengthening of a sound
- va
emphasis indicated by underlining
- (va)
uncertain transcription of talk
- ?
uncertain transcription of gaze timing
- ((va))
meta comments
- ± / &
Symbols mark where embodied actions described as meta comments begin.
- * *
The duration of a speaker’s gaze towards the other speaker is marked with two identical symbols (one symbol per participant).
- *--->
One speaker’s gaze towards the other continues across subsequent lines
- ---->*
until the same symbol is reached.
- >>
A speaker’s gaze towards the other begins before the excerpt’s beginning
- --->>
The action described continues after the excerpt’s end.
- #
The exact moment at which a screen shot has been taken.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
