Abstract
We present an investigation of the phonetic characteristics of the response tokens yeah (English) and dui (Mandarin) which, in spoken conversation, can be used either as backchannel items (not initiating a new turn) or as reply tokens (taking the floor). On the basis of two telephone corpora, we investigate whether there are prosodic differences (specifically: pitch, duration, and intensity) between these two types of uses. We find that the most consistent prosodic cue that distinguishes the two, both in Mandarin and English, is intensity, with mixed results for pitch and no role for duration in either language. The pragmatic difference between a reply and a backchannel token is thus signalled by its position in the sequence but reinforced by prosodic means. The way in which this is achieved, i.e. by intensity, involves the cue that is the least likely to upset existing lexical contrasts, both in English and Mandarin.
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