Three Elements Defining the Utterance Patterns of Speakers in Small-Group Conversations(<Special Issue>Investigating Verbal Behaviour with Experiments)

Abstract

Researches conducted by Fujimoto et al. have introduced a new concept about the speaker role; namely, a speaker speaks according to a distinct role acquired in response to his/her individual characteristic and situation. This paper looks at an attempt to specify a speaker role inductively from his/her predication pattern and conversation development pattern in a conversation. Firstly, five conversation development patterns were extracted from data of small-group discussions. Secondly, a canonical correlation analysis was conducted to show the relationship between conversation development patterns and the predication patterns that had been extracted in Fujimoto and Daibo (2005, in press). As a result, three speaker roles (the chairperson, listener, and speaker) were specified.