Knappes Sprechen

The German Linguistic Studies Series is a comprehensive and outstanding forum in its field. It has borne the name of its subject in its title since the foundation of the series in the eighth decade of the last century.
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The form of language used to accompany actions performs different functions from a conversation; it differs in its structure, and analysis reveals hitherto largely neglected phenomena such as the tendency to employ terse, compressed utterances. The study investigates 'terse linguistic expression' and describes selected forms of it using the methods of conversation analysis. Discussion of a corpus of exchanges recorded while the participants were watching television indicates explanation strategies for dealing with terse utterances. Special reference is made here to the connection between terseness and sociability.