Abstract
It is known that the chiming-in and the postpositional particle “ne” play important roles when people try to communicate smoothly with one another, and that there exists a relationship between them. But it is not clear how the frequency of the chiming-in affects the frequency of the postpositional particle “ne”. We conducted an experiment to examine it.
The participants in the experiment were sixteen students (S1, ..., S16) and one teacher (T), and each set of subjects consisted of two students (Si, Sj) and the teacher (T). We had eight subject-sets. Before the experiment, the two students in each subject-set were supposed to decide the theme they would talk about, and, to have thought about the contents of their talk. In the experiment, they were supposed to talk about the theme to the teacher. For the half of eight subject-sets (called “Many Group”), the teacher chimed in at each transition relevance place (TRP) as possible as he could. For the other half (called “Few Group”), the teacher chimed in only when the utterance terminated. The conversation was recorded by a tape-recorder, and transcribed to count the number of appearances of the postpositional particle “ne”.
The frequency of the postpositional particle “ne” had a statistical tendency to be larger in the Few Group than in the Many Group.
