Koole-Verberg2017
| Koole-Verberg2017 | |
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| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Koole-Verberg2017 |
| Author(s) | Tom Koole, Nina Verberg |
| Title | Aligning caller and call-taker: The opening phrase of Dutch emergency calls |
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| Tag(s) | EMCA, Emergency Calls, Applied Conversation Analysis, Preference organization, Type-conformity |
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| Year | 2017 |
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| Journal | Pragmatics and Society |
| Volume | 8 |
| Number | 1 |
| Pages | 129-153 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1075/ps.8.1.07koo |
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Abstract
This paper reports on conversation analytic research for the Dutch national emergency call-centre. In a corpus study of 120 emergency calls we show that callers’ orientations to their communicative tasks are not aligned to the institutional communicative tasks of the call-takers. In a subsequent workplace experiment involving over 2000 calls, it appeared that the use of an alternative question rather than a wh-question, significantly altered callers’ emergency deliveries and adapted them to call-takers’ communicative needs. The analysis shows two aspects of callers’ responses to the different question formats: (i) The alternative questions produced significantly more type-conforming answers than the wh-questions, and also (ii) callers treated their non-conforming answer to alternative question more often as dispreferred than their non-conforming answers to wh-questions. Callers thus treated the preference for type-conformity to be stronger for alternative questions than for wh-questions.
Notes
