2023 Volume 26 Issue 1 Pages 110-122
This paper clarifies the effect hearers have on friendship building when they change the intimacy expression of their utterances in a dynamically symmetrical/asymmetrical manner with the speaker’s expressions during first meeting conversations. Hearers’ utterances were classified into the following types of responses: “responsive interjections,” “lexical reactive expressions,” “assessments,” “repetitions,” and “completions.” Changes in intimacy were evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively in terms of hearers’ and speakers’ speech levels. We analyzed twelve recorded 10-minute dyadic conversations between eight women aged 70 years or older who had never met before. The results showed that: (1) speaker’s utterances tended to be based on polite form, while hearer’s utterances tended to be based on normal form; (2) hearer’s lexical reactive expressions that appear at the end of the narrative tended to be polite forms; (3) hearers may intentionally deviate from the sociality that constrains the first meeting and downshift the speech level to normal; and (4) during a speaker’s speech, the hearer may dynamically upshift or downshift the speech level of a “responsive interjection.” These results suggest by dynamically changing their intimacy expressions, hearers adjust emotional distance to become closer in first meetings.
