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(Language Log)
Athanasia Chalari, "Greeks are ready to change", The Economist (Prospero) 10/24/2013:
Another interesting point about the difficulty in reaching a consensus has to do with social linguistics, how Greeks talk. [...]
Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.
The reader who sent in this link noted:
Seems wrong to me–a quick look at WALS finds verb-first languages pretty even scattered over the world, plus many languages that pack more into the average word than Greek does its verbs, but I didn't have the time to test the claim thoroughly. But maybe you could do it, since you have a lot more information about turn-taking than I do. I was just skeptical that Greek is really that unusual in being 1) verb first and 2) relatively synthetic, so that one gets a lot of information out of the way in the first word of a sentence. (And all those verb-first, synthetic languages could just as easily lead to nice, harmonious exchanges of short sentences. I can imagine being more likely to interrupt if the crucial bits were at the end, since I would be inclined to say "get on with it!" or "You're wrong!" out of impatience.)
Dr. Chalari does not seem to have published any accessible papers on this subject. But there's a monograph that Penn's library doesn't have — Athanasia Chalari, Why Greeks Interrupt Each Other: The phenomenon of ‘overlaps’ in everyday Greek Conversations, 2012:
κλπ. κλπ. Διαβάστε και τα σχόλια.
Athanasia Chalari, "Greeks are ready to change", The Economist (Prospero) 10/24/2013:
Another interesting point about the difficulty in reaching a consensus has to do with social linguistics, how Greeks talk. [...]
Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.
The reader who sent in this link noted:
Seems wrong to me–a quick look at WALS finds verb-first languages pretty even scattered over the world, plus many languages that pack more into the average word than Greek does its verbs, but I didn't have the time to test the claim thoroughly. But maybe you could do it, since you have a lot more information about turn-taking than I do. I was just skeptical that Greek is really that unusual in being 1) verb first and 2) relatively synthetic, so that one gets a lot of information out of the way in the first word of a sentence. (And all those verb-first, synthetic languages could just as easily lead to nice, harmonious exchanges of short sentences. I can imagine being more likely to interrupt if the crucial bits were at the end, since I would be inclined to say "get on with it!" or "You're wrong!" out of impatience.)
Dr. Chalari does not seem to have published any accessible papers on this subject. But there's a monograph that Penn's library doesn't have — Athanasia Chalari, Why Greeks Interrupt Each Other: The phenomenon of ‘overlaps’ in everyday Greek Conversations, 2012:
κλπ. κλπ. Διαβάστε και τα σχόλια.