lingthusiasm

Bonus 51: Lingthusiasm live show: The Listener Talks Back

Added 2021-05-06 22:01:00 +0000 UTC

When someone else is telling a story, you might encourage them to keep talking or to elaborate on a particular point by making various words, sounds, phrases, or gestures, such as "oh really?" and "mhm-hm" and nodding. In a digital context, you might also show that you're following along by liking a message or sending a carefully-chosen emoji. This linguistic behaviour is known as backchannelling.

In this episode, our first virtual liveshow, we get enthusiastic about the linguistics of backchannelling, all the while giving you the chance to backchannel to us and each other in the chat alongside (so meta). We also talk about backchannelling in Tactile ASL, the ingressive "yeah" and its distribution beyond the Vikings, backchannelling to tomato plants, and more listener questions!

Announcements:

This is a recording of our first virtual liveshow, with some light editing to make it work better as a regular episode. For the full, unedited livestream version, you can still watch that here.

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

To chat about this episode and other lingthusiastic topics with your fellow linguistics fans, join us on the Lingthusiasm Discord server.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, our liveshow producer is Liz McCullough, our liveshow captioner is Jordan from White Coat Captioning, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles