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  • Telephone calls: Unity and diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures ed. by Kang Kwong Luke, Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou
  • Bingyun Li
Telephone calls: Unity and diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures. Ed. by Kang Kwong Luke and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou. (Pragmatics and beyond new series 101.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. x, 295. ISBN 1588112195. $88 (Hb).

Telephone calls consists of papers presented at a panel devoted to telephone conversation at the 6th International Pragmatics Conference held at Reims, France, in July 1998. This volume addresses several central issues in telephone calls such as openings, closings, topic movement, and problem solving from a conversation-analytic perspective. Methodological and theoretical issues are also discussed. In the introduction, entitled ‘Studying telephone calls: Beginnings, developments, and perspectives’ (3–21), editors Kang Kwong Luke and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou present an excellent account of the past and present of telephone conversation research, identifying its sociological, intercultural, and methodological motivations and discussing progress made in openings, closings, and topic management. This introduction concludes with an overview of the nine chapters, which are grouped in three parts.

The four chapters in Part 1, which is dedicated to telephone openings, re-examine the four canonical core sequences in telephone openings identified by Emanuel A. Schegloff. In ‘Recognition and identification in Japanese and Korean telephone conversation [End Page 629] openings’ (25–47), Yong-Yae Park analyzes ‘the presence or absence of the so-called background providers and contrastive connectives, kedo in Japanese and nuntey in Korean’ (25). In ‘On the telephone again! Telephone conversation openings in Greek’ (49–85), Maria Sifianou shows that neither Greek callers nor answerers provide overt self-identification very often and that ‘the frequency of contact and the relationship between interlocutors’ (78–79) largely determines the organization of telephone openings. She concludes with a warning against possible ‘cultural hegemony’ in cultural studies. Carmen Taleghani-Nikazm’s chapter, ‘Telephone conversation openings in Persian’ (87–109), focuses on both formal and informal calls, showing that taarof, as a Persian politeness phenomenon, influences the sequential structure of telephone openings. In ‘Language choice in international telephone conversations’ (111–31), Gitte Rasmussen and Johannes Wanger identify three commonly used patterns in terms of language choice in international calls.

There are three chapters in Part 2, which is devoted to ‘Problem solving, topic management and closing’. In ‘Reporting problems and offering assistance in Japanese business telephone conversations’ (135–70), Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura reports on two case studies of Japanese business telephone conversations, exploring how the speech acts of problem-reporting and assistance-offering are interactively constructed. In ‘The initiation and introduction of first topics in Hong Kong telephone calls’ (171–200), Kang Kwong Luke deals with topic organization, identifying various linguistic markers that may be used to indicate the initiation and introduction of the reason-for-the-call as a likely first topic. Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou’s ‘Moving towards closing: Greek telephone calls between familiars’ (201–29) is the only paper in the present volume that addresses telephone closings. After identifying two Greek discourse markers used to indicate the termination of the last topic and initiation of the closing section, the author moves on to discuss how ‘to locate an exact point of initiation of the closing section’ (224).

Part 3 deals with methodological and theoretical issues. In ‘Comparing telephone call openings: Theoretical and methodological reflections’ (233–48), Paul ten Have argues against the traditional structural approach. The author proposes that a functional interactional perspective on telephone call openings should be adopted, because ‘underlying any differences in forms and formats there is a kind of functional similarity’ (235). The concluding chapter, contributed by Emanuel A. Schegloff, is entitled ‘Some reflections on telephone conversations: Issues of cross-cultural scope and scholarly exchange, interactional import and consequences’ (249–81).

To sum up, this volume investigates telephone conversation in various languages and cultures (such as Cantonese, English, Greek, Korean, and Persian) and explores its universal and culture-specific characteristics. The volume, which represents the state of the art in research in telephone interaction, adds...

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