A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
Task-Completing Assessments in Service Encounters
Authors: Jan Lindström, Catrin Norrby, Camilla Wide, Jenny Nilsson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Publication year: 2019
Journal: Research on Language and Social Interaction
Journal acronym: ROLSI
Volume: 52
Issue: 2
First page : 85
Last page: 103
Number of pages: 19
ISSN: 0835-1813
eISSN: 1532-7973
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2019.1581468
Web address : https://doi.org/10.1080/08351813.2019.1581468
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/40650519
This study examines positive low- and high-grade assessments in service encounters between customers and salespersons conducted in Swedish and recorded in Sweden and Finland. The assessments occur in a regular sequential pattern as third-turn moves that complete request-delivery sequences, longer coherent requesting sections, or request sequences in a pre-closing context. The positive valence of the assessments coheres with the satisfactory outcome of task completion, but their function is primarily pragmatic, used for segmenting the flow of task-oriented institutional interaction. The assessments stand as lexical TCUs, and their delivery is characterized by downgraded prosody and the speaker’s embodied shift away from the other. The analysis reveals distributional differences in the interactional practice: Customers produce task-completing assessments more often than the salespersons, and high-grade assessments are more frequent in the data from Sweden than from Finland. The data are in Sweden Swedish and Finland Swedish with English translations.
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