Business and Service Telephone Conversations: An Investigation of British English, German and Italian Encounters

190 Pages·2013·2.703 MB·English

by  Cecilia Varcasia (auth.)

Business and Service Telephone Conversations
Business and Service
Telephone Conversations
An Investigation of British English,
German and Italian Encounters
Cecilia Varcasia
Research Fellow, Free University Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
© Cecilia Varcasia 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-28617-8
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First published 2013 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-44919-4 ISBN 978-1-137-28618-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137286185
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Contents
List of Tables and Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
List of Abbreviations viii
Transcription Convention System ix
Introduction 1
1 Theoretical Framework 7
2 Data and Methodology 29
3 Simple Response Format to the Request 39
4 Response plus Extension 45
5 Insertion Sequence Followed by the Response 71
6 The Caller Leads the Conversation 96
7 The Different Response Formats at One Glance 108
8 Service Encounters and Call Centre Training Implications 118
9 Conclusions and Implications 138
Appendix 146
References 166
Subject Index 174
Author Index 180
v
List of Tables and Figures
Tables
2.1 Services called in the data 31
3.1 Simple response format 44
4.1 Extensions of the response 67
4.2 Types of increments of the response: the entire corpus 68
4.3 Types of increments of the response:
cross-cultural overview 68
5.1 Actions performed by the insertion sequence 90
5.2 Actions in the response after the occurrence of an
insertion sequence 91
5.3 Increment types in response format: insertion
sequence + response 93
5.4 Type of response following the insertion sequence 94
6.1 R responses to C’s solicitation of more talk 105
6.2 Actions in the delayed response expansion 105
6.3 Types of increments in solicited expansions of the response 107
7.1 Actions in the response: the corpus overall 110
7.2 Actions in the response: cross-cultural comparison 111
7.3 Free constituents and extension types of the increment of
the response 115
Figure
7.1 Simple vs complex response formats in English, German
and Italian 113
vi
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to many people who have contributed to the research and
supported my work at various stages. I am indebted the most to Gabriele
Pallotti, who encouraged me to begin my study of telephone talk and
has guided me from the very beginning. I am also very grateful to Greg
Myers for his support and patient examination of previous drafts of
this work. My appreciation and thanks also go to Paul Seedhouse, Hugo
Bowles and two anonymous reviewers for their sometimes challenging
comments and suggestions at various stages of the research.
I would also like to especially thank all the services who participated
in the project and gave their consent for recording in the three coun-
tries. Many thanks to the people who helped me in the collection of the
data and their transcription: Paola Contu, Gloria Deriu, Silvia Nieddu,
Anna Tilocca, but also David, Steve, Tania, Juliane, Nina, Susan and
Dario.
Last but not least, special thanks to Rosmarie de Monte Frick for her
patient and prompt final linguistic review of the manuscript. Any mis-
takes or imperfections are entirely my responsibility.
vii
List of Abbreviations
AP adjacency pair
C caller
CA conversation analysis
DA discourse analysis
NP noun phrase
PCP possible completion point
PSE public service encounter
R receiver
SFL systemic functional linguistics
TCU turn constructional unit
TRP transition relevance place
Unattached NP unattached noun phrase
viii
Transcription Convention System
Below are the main conventions for transcription developed by Gail
Jefferson and reported in more detail in Atkinson and Heritage (1984),
ten Have (1999), Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998), Silverman (1998), Charles
Antaki’s online introduction to transcription http://www-staff.lboro.
ac.uk/~ssca1/transintro1.htm, and Schegloff’s online tutorial http://www.
sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/schegloff/TranscriptionProject/index.html.
C caller
R receiver
. marks a falling pitch or intonation
, indicates a continuing intonation with slight upward
or downward contour
? indicates a rising vocal pitch or intonation
Italics emphasis
CAPITAL raised voice
lo::ng stretched sounds
ºquietº words spoken in a low voice
>speed-up< increased speed of delivery
<speed-down> decreased speed of delivery
[ ] brackets indicate overlapping utterances
= equal marks indicate contiguous utterances, or con-
tinuation of the same utterance to the next line
.hh/hh. audible inbreath/outbreath.
ye(hh)s h’s within parentheses indicate within-speech aspira-
tion, possibly laughter
( . ) full stop within parentheses indicates micropause
(2.0) number within parentheses indicates pause of length
in approximate seconds
((cough)) items within double parentheses indicate some sound
or feature of the talk which is not easily transcribable,
e.g. ‘((in falsetto))’ and transcriber’s comments on
some extra-linguistic phenomenon
(yes) parentheses indicate transcriber’s doubt about hearing
of passage
(cid:2) / bold analyst’s signal of a significant line
ix
Introduction
The relationship between service providers and customers in service
encounters is quite a delicate matter. The success of the business may
depend on such relationships and the care taken of the customers.
This study aims at investigating service encounters on the telephone
in English, German and Italian from a conversation analysis (CA) per-
spective. Since the beginnings of CA, telephone calls have been widely
researched. At the beginning, studies aimed at discovering regularities
and patterns in this distinct type of conversation, above all in its open-
ing and closing sequences. One strand of this research has tried to find
common and different patterns among different languages through
cross-cultural studies. Less attention has been paid to the development
of these exchanges after the openings. This is the object of this book.
Previous studies focused on the construction of such relationships
between service providers and customers in face-to-face encounters,
as in the work of the Pixi project in which English and Italian book-
shop encounters were compared (Aston, 1988a; Zorzi, 1990; Brodine,
1991), and the interactions between the employees of a reprographic
store’s drop-off counter and their customers by Vinkhuyzen and
Szymanski (2005), in which non-granting requests were analysed. The
way speakers deal with the business on the phone has only recently
been explored by Lee (2011a), in her analysis of a distinctive type of
telephone conversation, i.e. that made to an airline service in South
Korea. In her study she examines how the airline agents design their
conduct when customers’ requests cannot be satisfied and how they
shape their conduct in a conciliatory direction. Most of the studies on
telephone talk in service encounters have focused rather on the open-
ing sequence of the conversation in different languages, as here speak-
ers follow specific conversational routines and rituals (cf. Schegloff,
1