Symposium "Questions-answers in Greek Talk-in-interaction"
October 13th-14th, 2016
Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation, A.U.Th., Thessaloniki
The Institute of Modern Greek Studies [Manolis Triandaphyllidis Foundation] of the A.U.Th. organized its 2nd Symposium on the Greek Language in Spoken Communication, held in Thessaloniki, at the Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation, on 13-14 October 2016. The Symposium was organized as part of the Institute’s activities on spoken Greek and in the context of the research project Greek Talk-in-interaction and Conversation Analysis. The topic of the Symposium was Questions-answers in Greek Talk-in-interaction.
The aim of the Symposium was to examine systematically aspects of this nuclear sequence in Greek talk-in-interaction both in everyday conversations and in more institutional settings. Moreover, the Symposium hosted a session on questions-answers in other languages, so that discussion of the Greek data can be set in the cross-linguistic perspective of talk-in-interaction. The keynote speaker of the Symposium was Professor Marja-Leena Sorjonen (University of Helsinki), Director of the Finnish Center of Excellence in Intersubjectivity and Interaction.
The following topics (not exclusive) were of interest:
• form/structure of questions/answers
• functions associated with particular forms/structures
• formal features (morpho-syntactic, prosodic, etc.) of questions and their impact on answers
• preference organization in the question-answer sequence
• the design of questions/answers and the acts accomplished
• distribution of epistemic rights and kinds of acts
• stances (perspective, subjectivity, etc.) indexed by particular forms of questions/answers
• the multimodality of the question-answer sequence (gestures, nods, gaze, etc.)
• the impact of the broader context (e.g., everyday conversation, research interview, etc. vs. TV-discussion or -interview) on the design of the question-answer sequence
• interpersonal issues (politeness, impoliteness, face threats, etc.)