Temporal Inferences in Conversation

Christine Paul

doi:10.2478/v10015-011-0021-1

Authors

Christine Paul Free University, Berlin, Germany

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/v10015-011-0021-1

Abstract

Within this article, I explore how coproductions (expansions made by a second speaker upon a previous utterance) and questions regarding prior utterances work to verbalize inferences regarding the temporal information in spoken German conversation. While questions regarding prior utterances and coproductions are traditionally understood to have different communicative functions (signaling understanding/ misunderstanding; turn taking) to coproductions, empirical data shows how these expression types enable the speaker to gradually verbalize different strengths of assumption about details of the previous turn. These two expression types are not a dichotomy, but a continuum.

Author Biography

Christine Paul, Free University, Berlin, Germany

Christine Paul is a PhD student at the Free University Berlin and lecturer at the Goethe Institute Berlin. She studied Romance Languages and German Linguistics at the Free University Berlin and recieved a Scholarship in order to study at the University of Lima (Peru). Her research interests lie in semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and conversation analysis.

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