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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 31:1 (2021) ► pp.6–32

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The functional components of telephone conversation opening phase in Jordanian Arabic

 | Jordan University of Science and Technology
 | Jordan University of Science and Technology
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 25 August 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19034.ala
Abstract
Our study purports to examine the rhetorical structure of informal telephone conversation opening phase in Jordanian Arabic and the lexico-grammatical and stylistic encodings of these pragmatic options. To this end, a corpus of 100 telephone conversation recordings was collected from Jordanian Arabic. The recordings were based on the participants’ personal cell phones with their families and friends. Our data analysis drew on House, Juliane. 1982. “Opening and Closing Phases in German and English Dialogues.” Grazer Linguistische Studien 161: 52–82.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar and Sun, Hao. 2004. “Opening Moves in Chinese Telephone Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 361: 1429–1465. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar models of interactional moves to find out the component options used to articulate this phase. The results revealed that although the group of participants use a set of functional components similar to those identified in other cultures, there are additional functional component options like ‘ostensible invitation’ and ‘God-wishes’ that are only used by Jordanians. Besides, they utilize various lexico-grammatical devices and stylistic options to articulate these components. These choices can be attributed to the socio-cultural background of the Jordanian Arabic native speakers.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Cultural and cross-cultural studies of telephone opening phase
    • 2.2Phaticity in telephone openings
  • 3.Data collection and description of research instrument
  • 4.Procedures of data analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Answer
    • 5.2Greeting
    • 5.3Address
    • 5.4Question-after-you (QAY)
    • 5.5God-wishes
    • 5.6Ostensible invitation
    • 5.7Lack of contact
    • 5.8Disturbance check
    • 5.9Territorial breach apology (TBA)
    • 5.10Topic introduction
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Transliteration
  • References
References (53)
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