Comparing Continuers: A Multimodal study on Addressee feedback in Yélî Dnye and how it compares to Dutch
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2025-08-27
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en
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Addressee feedback is seen as a building block of every conversation. Small noises like ‘mhmm’ or ‘huh?’ just like proper words like ‘yes’, or ‘sorry?’, also called interjections, have been classified based on their function. There are also gestures, like head nods or squints, that can have similar functions. However, not many studies have been done comparing addressee feedback between languages, and rarely, have there been comparisons using languages outside the western language sphere or done with multimodal utterances in mind. With this, the current study sought out to investigate continuers in the isolate Yele language (or Yélî Dnye) spoken on the Rossel island in Papua New Guinea, to comprise an extensive list of all continuers used and their modalities. Additionally, the study at hand aimed to compare the preference of modalities when using continuers and addressee feedback in general to a Germanic language - Dutch. As Yele has many unique gestures on top of the conventional gestures we know, it was hypothesized that conversation in Yele will have more of a reliance on gestural and multimodal continuers and addressee feedback. 20 dyadic face-to-face conversation recordings were annotated and analyzed.
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