Abstract
"Confirmation acts" play an essential role in successful conversational interactions, especially in contact situation discourse (i.e., discourse between NSs and NNSs). Previous studies analyzing contact situations have focused mainly on the question of the NNS's comprehension of the NS's utterances. However, we assert that it is necessary to analyze discourse in contact situations from the following two points of view: 1) the roles of both the NNS and the NS, and 2) the roles of both comprehension and production. In this study, we propose a descriptive framework for "confirmation acts" in contact situations. This framework has three categories: 1) the holder of "the floor," 2) the addresser/addressee of the confirmation act, and 3) the place where the act takes place. Based on our descriptive framework, utterances comprising "confirmation acts" are classified into eight types.
