Abstract
Intercultural communication is often said to be important without specifying the cultural and linguistic differences to be understood and overcome. Such specification is the aim of cross- and intercultural pragmatics, and of the current study. With data from two spoken corpora, I investigate possible differences in conversational style between Spanish (in Valencia) and Norwegian (in Oslo). I apply Tannen's suggested contrast between a 'high consideration' style and a 'high engagement' style (1980), as emphasizing the courtesy values of, respectively, autonomy and affiliation (Bravo, 1996). As operationalizations of the two styles, I investigate frequencies of back-channeling nasalizations ("mm", "mhm" etc.) and supportive simultaneous speech (cf. Tannen, 1983; Fant, 2006; i.a.). I hypothesize that the former is more prominent in the data from the Norwegian Corpus of Spoken Language (NoTa-Oslo) and that the latter is more prominent in the data from the Val.Es.Co Corpus of Coloquial Spanish. Such contrasts could lead to misunderstandings in intercultural encounters: Norwegians could interpret the absence of back-channeling nasalizations from Spaniards as a lack of cooperative listenership, and the presence of simultaneous speech as interruption and possibly aggression (cf. Fant, 1989). Spaniards, on their part, could interpret the absence of supportive simultaneous speech as a lack of interest, and the presence of back-channeling nasalizations as expressions of true agreement (ibid.). In order to investigate the validity and generality of these claims, I include the sociolinguistic variables of age, gender and, where available, socioeconomic strata. The first hypothesis is confirmed, as the Norwegian data consistently show higher frequencies of back-channeling nasalizations than the Spanish data (averages of 1.39/min. vs. 0.39/min). The second hypothesis, however, is disconfirmed, as the Spanish data show lower frequencies of supportive simultaneous speech than the Norwegian data (averages of 0.6/min. vs 1.0/min), which in turn show considerable sociolinguistic variation. The speakers often ambulate between longer supportive overlap and shorter response tokens like "ja" or "sí" (yes), in a way that suggests the need, in both languages, for continual balancing of consideration and engagement. The clearest contrast found, then, is that the Oslo-informants, considerably more so than the Valencia-informants, show conversational consideration through the use of back-channeling mm's. Among the Valencia-informants, back-channeling nasalizations are mostly used by academics (as suggested by Hidalgo Navarro), who prefer the English classic continuer "mhm". The few cases of "mhm" among the Oslo-informants are mostly ironic; as a classic continuer they prefer the "mm" following the Norwegian toneme 2. The sociolinguistic analysis shows, in the data from Oslo, a higher preference for back-channeling by means of both nasalizations and supportive simultaneous speech among the higher socioeconomic strata.