Interest in a subject often begins almost unnoticed. In the middle of the 1980s, when I was a research assistant for Professor Auli Hakulinen, I was transcribing some conversations from groups of men. At some point I started paying attention to some short sounds on the tapes: now “mm” (‘um’), now “joo” (‘yeah’) or “niin” (‘so’ or ‘well’). This led me to research the similarities and differences in the response words (response particles) “joo” and “niin” all the way to my doctoral dissertation. That also led me to study various conversation functions and conversation structures, since “joo” and “niin” can be used to respond to many different kinds of utterance.

These apparently humble linguistic expressions offer us a window into the fine-grained structure of interaction. The meaning and function of response words – just like other expressions – varies according to the place in which they are used in the conversation (e.g. the word “joo” lacks a meaning that is stable from situation to situation).

Right now, for me one of the most burning questions is the extent to which interaction practices are universal, common to all human communities, and the extent and manner in which they differ from one language and culture to another – what kinds of resources different languages and cultures have adopted for their interaction needs.

At our Centre of Excellence, Intersubjectivity in Interaction, we are researching, for nine European languages, situations in which speakers use the imperative mood to tell their partner to do something, how fine-grained the distinctions are that speakers of different languages make when having received new information, understood something, et cetera, and the extent to which different languages employ rising intonation. In a society that is becoming ever more multilingual, it is even more essential to gain knowledge of the interaction practices of people coming from different cultures and language communities.