[Air-l] a ps on hedges

[Christian Nelson]

On Apr 13, 2006, at 2:32 PM, Bonnie Nardi wrote:

> I didn't mean to suggest that turn taking is turned off in interviews. 
> I meant to suggest that because the interviewee knows she has the 
> floor for as long as she wants it, the hesitations have some meaning 
> because the speaker is not worried about losing her turn. In a sense 
> the interview situation may permit more hesitations than everyday
> conversation for that very reason.

Whether interviews are all that different is, of course, an empirical 
matter. For empirical studies that would shed light on this, at least 
with regard to structured interviews, one could do no better than look 
at Hanneke Houtkoop-Steenstra's book "Interaction and the Standardized 
Survey Interview : The Living Questionnaire" and the papers in 
"Standardization and Tacit Knowledge: Interaction and Practice in the 
Survey Interview" which she co-edited with Doug Maynard and others. For 
other types of interviews, I suspect there's a pertinent paper or two 
in "Talk at Work." But, to be sure, and to find the latest/most 
pertinent, I'd recommend sending a query to the languse list, where a 
lot of conversation and discourse analysts congregate.

> People hesitate for many reasons -- they are lying, they are unsure of 
> what they are saying, they are not sure whether they should reveal 
> something, they are searching for the words that say what they mean, 
> they have never articulated the answer to a question someone (such as 
> an interviewer) asks. The problem is is figuring out which reason
> applies in a given situation.

Again, that's a claim requiring empirical justification. As the 
deception literature shows, there are lots of things we think we know 
about the signs of deception that turn out to be myths, and I think 
that verbal hesitation is one of those mythical symptoms. This comes as 
no surprise--conversation analysts have regularly discovered that what 
we commonsensically "know" about interaction is bunk.

Cheers,
Christian Nelson