Double Sayings of German JA—More Observations on Their Phonetic Form and Alignment Function

This article complements earlier research on double sayings of the response token JA in German. Golato and Fagyal (2006, 2008) have already described two types of JAJA in telephone conversations, which are differentiated by position of the pitch peak and interactional function in the management of different kinds of disalignment in talk. Based on an interactional-linguistic study of some 180 instances of double sayings of JA in a range of private and institutional contexts, this article shows that there are further variants of JAJA in German interaction. All of them are characterized by specific sequential and prosodic-phonetic properties and interactional functions as well. In particular, the article shows that JAJA can not only contextualize different kinds of disalignment—some in addition to the ones already described—but that it also has alignment uses. Moreover, it points out that JAJAs with these different kinds of (dis)alignment can have consequences of various sorts in terms of the trajectory of the sequence they occur in. These range from aborting the sequence via momentarily changing or accepting its sequential trajectory to promoting it.

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