{"id":8219,"date":"2013-11-04T05:01:25","date_gmt":"2013-11-04T10:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=8219"},"modified":"2013-11-04T08:28:57","modified_gmt":"2013-11-04T13:28:57","slug":"greek-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=8219","title":{"rendered":"Greek conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Athanasia Chalari, \"Greeks are ready to change<\/a>\", The Economist (Prospero)<\/em> 10\/24\/2013:<\/p>\n

Another interesting point about the difficulty in reaching a consensus has to do with social linguistics, how Greeks talk. […]<\/span><\/p>\n

Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.<\/span><\/p>\n

The reader who sent in this link noted:<\/p>\n

Seems wrong to me–a quick look at WALS finds verb-first languages pretty even scattered over the world, plus many languages that pack more into the average word than Greek does its verbs, but I didn't have the time to test the claim thoroughly. But maybe you could do it, since you have a lot more information about turn-taking than I do. \u00a0I was just skeptical that Greek is really that unusual in being 1) verb first and 2) relatively synthetic, so that one gets a lot of information out of the way in the first word of a sentence. \u00a0(And all those verb-first, synthetic languages could just as easily lead to nice, harmonious exchanges of short sentences. I can imagine being more likely to interrupt if the crucial bits were at the end, since I would be inclined to say \"get on with it!\" or \"You're wrong!\" out of impatience.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Dr. Chalari does not seem to have published any accessible papers on this subject<\/a>. But there's a monograph that Penn's library doesn't have — Athanasia Chalari, Why Greeks Interrupt Each Other: The phenomenon of \u2018overlaps\u2019 in everyday Greek Conversations<\/a><\/em>, 2012:<\/p>\n

This book deals with the study of how Greek grammar and syntax make possible the occurrence of overlaps in specific locations, in everyday Greek conversation. Greek grammar and syntax have specific functions (such as freer word order, much information included in the verb, subject omission) which allow interaction to occur in specific forms (displays early projectability and early occurrence of overlaps). The co-existence of the above grammatical and syntactical characteristics within a Greek turn, make possible the appearance of overlaps in specific locations. Consequently, syntactic practices of Modern Greek language shape the organisation of overlaps that occur in everyday Greek conversations. In Greek, grammar and interaction organise each other and more specifically syntactic practices of language shape the organization of overlaps. This book proposes that if over time the suggestions of this study are generalisable then it could be supported that social and national stereotypes (for example that Greeks are loud or impolite or that they talk all together and interrupt each other) actually born in interaction.<\/span><\/p>\n

There also seems to have been an unpublished 2005 version, \"Why Greeks talk at the same time all together: examining the phenomenon of overlaps in everyday Greek conversations<\/a>\", with the following abstract:<\/p>\n

In recent work on Conversation Analysis there has been a growing interdisciplinary interest among conversation analysts and linguists with regard interpretation of social interaction and grammar\/syntax. This paper investigates the phenomenon of overlaps in everyday Greek conversation within the context of the amalgamation of interaction and grammar\/syntax. The core of the present investigation would be the study of how Greek grammar and syntax make possible the occurrence of overlaps in specific locations, in everyday Greek conversation. Greek grammar and syntax have specific functions (such as freer word order, much information included in the verb, subject omission) which allow interaction to occur in specific forms (displays early projectability and early occurrence of overlaps). Furthermore, the co-existence of the above grammatical and syntactical characteristics within a Greek turn, make possible the appearance of overlaps in specific locations. Consequently, syntactic practices of Modern Greek language shape the organisation of overlaps that occur in everyday Greek conversations.\u00a0In Greek, grammar and interaction organise each other and more specifically syntactic practices of language shape the organization of overlaps. This study proposes that if over time the suggestions of this study are generalisable then it could be supported that social and national stereotypes (for example that Greeks are loud or impolite or that they talk all together) actually born in interaction. Namely, those kinds of patterns (the production of early overlaps because of the Greek grammar and syntax) lead to those kinds of perceptions (that Greeks are loud and interruptive, as many of us characterise ourselves).<\/span><\/p>\n

I haven't been able to locate any subsequent attempts<\/a> to determine empirically if \"the suggestions of this study are generalisable\".<\/p>\n

I once participated in some work on differences in overlap distributions across languages (or cultures), which notably failed to validate our pre-existing \"social and national stereotypes\" — \u00a0Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman, and Chris Cieri, \"Towards an integrated understanding of speech overlaps in conversation<\/a>\", ICPhS 2007:<\/p>\n

We investigate factors that affect speech overlaps in conversation, using large corpora of conversational telephone speech. We analyzed two types of speech overlaps: 1. One side takes over the turn before the other side finishes (turn-taking type); 2. One side speaks in the middle of the other side\u2019s turn (backchannel type). We found that Japanese conversations have more short turn-taking type of overlap segments than the other languages. In general, females make more speech overlaps of both types than males; and both males and females make more overlaps when talking to females than talking to males. People make fewer overlaps when talking with strangers than talking with familiars, and the frequency of speech overlaps is significantly affected by conversation topics. Finally, the two conversation sides are highly correlated on their frequencies of using turn-taking type of overlaps but not backchannel type.<\/p>\n

We didn't have any Greek conversation to analyze, but based on our experience, it would seem to be appropriate to take a carefully empirical approach to the question of who does how much of what kind of interrupting, as well as what grammatical features might be correlated with possible linguistic or cultural differences in such things.<\/p>\n

A sample of somewhat-relevant LL posts:<\/p>\n

\"The rhetoric of silence<\/a>\", 10\/3\/2004
\n\"Crib notes and earphones<\/a>\", 10\/4\/2004
\n\"Linguistic mens rea<\/a>\", 10\/6\/2005
\n\"Hungarian speech rate and the tribunal of revolutionary empirical justice<\/a>\", 8\/16\/2006
\n\"Next week: an experiment in primate communication?<\/a>\", 8\/31\/2008
\n\"Conversational rhythms<\/a>\", 4\/13\/2009
\n\"Two cultures<\/a>\", 3\/20\/2010
\n\"The art of conversation<\/a>\", 7\/24\/2010
\n\"Non-markovian yawp<\/a>\", 9\/18\/2011
\n\"Marmoset conversation<\/a>\", 10\/21\/2013
\n\"Speaker-change offsets<\/a>\", 10\/22\/2013<\/p>\n

And I'll add one case where national stereotypes were validated, and another (noted by Ginger Yellow in the comments) where they were criticized:<\/p>\n

\"Nationality, gender, and pitch<\/a>\", 11\/12\/2007
\n\"<\/span>Thriving on confusion in The Guardian<\/a>\", \u00a05\/24\/2006<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Athanasia Chalari, \"Greeks are ready to change\", The Economist (Prospero) 10\/24\/2013: Another interesting point about the difficulty in reaching a consensus has to do with social linguistics, how Greeks talk. […] Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-and-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8219"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8237,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8219\/revisions\/8237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}