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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
A. Background of Study
During conversation, people have to be cooperative in order to get the purpose of communication. Cooperation during a communication is
important. A communication is not going well if the participant could not cooperate with each other. However, communication shares some
information which is the main thing for participants to know. There are many ways used by people to communicate and one of
them is through a conversation. Conversation is a part of communication when people try to share information with other people. Conversation is
the people way to sustain their relationship with others. It involves two members in a conversation, doing the different role as speaker and hearer.
According to Pridham, conversation is categorized according to the situation: situated, semi, and natural conversation.
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In a situated conversation, often the conversation structure proceeds step by step in
order to develop the topic and interaction between each participant is unnatural because the interaction depends on a script, for examples:
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Francesca Pridham, The Language of Conversation, New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 57.
conversation in a movie and drama. Moreover, semi conversation has a flexible and fluid structure, for examples: talk show and interview. As a
semi conversation, talk show contains the structure which is usually organized and it can be set in an interview guide. Furthermore, natural
conversation occurs spontaneously, without any planning or prompting beforehand and also the participants have not set the topic before, so topic
change or shift can occur.
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In daily conversation, people unconsciously have been tied to a basic concept of an interaction. They tend to obey the communication
rules during a conversation. The rules might be some knowledge that speaker and hearer have already know. For instance, they have to make
some feedback and respond or they have to listen to the speaker and wait till they have a right to speak during a conversation. Those problems are
some mechanisms that occur in conversation. When people getting involves in conversation, they do a respond to
the speaker indicate that they are listening, the respond through a feedback both verbal and non-verbal. The feedback is given by participant of
conversation such as yeah, uh-huh, right and so on, called backchannels. Backchannels occur in both direct and indirect conversation such as face-
to-face and telephone conversation. People use this signal in conversation because they have to convince the speaker that the information has
received and they understand what the speaker talk about.
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Ibid, p. 59.
There are many different ways of doing the signal, including head nods, smiles, and other facial expressions and gestures, but the most
common vocal indication. Some of these are present in Mary‟s
contribution in conversation below. Caller: If you use your long distance service a lot than you‟ll
Marry: uh-uh Caller: be interested in the discount I‟m talking about because
Marry: yeah Caller: it can only save you money to switch to a cheaper service
Marry: mmm These type of signals „uh-uh‟, „yeah‟, „mmm‟ provide feedback
to the current speaker that the message is being received.
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The absence of backchannels is typically interpreted as significant. During telephone
conversations, the absence of backchannels may prompt the speaker to ask if the listener is still there. During face-to-face interaction, the absence of
backchannels may be interpreted as a way of withholding agreement, leading to an inference of disagreement.
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Furthermore, as the mechanism in conversation, backchannels is really related to both of turn taking system and overlap. The difference
between backchannels and both of them is that backchannels do not
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George Yule, Pragmatics, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 75-76.
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Ibid.
purloin the speaker shift. People do backchannels in order to give a feedback to what speaker says. Thus, backchannels do not legitimate the
speakership. As previously mentioned, conversation is necessity for people in
their daily life and backchannels always occur in their daily conversation in order to give contribution during conversation. Thus, the issue interests
the writer to do this research by analyzing a conversation which contain backchannels.
B. Focus of The Study
Kategori