Achieving Multi-unit Turns: The Versatile Token Khob in Persian Extended Tellings

This paper provides a conversation analytical and multimodal examination of a highly ubiquitous Persian token, khob, in everyday Persian multi-unit tellings. Based upon corpora of daily interactions between family members and friends over phone and face-to-face, three functions of khob are identified: (a) khob can be used by the recipient to a telling as a response functioning as a continuer and acknowledgement token, passing the opportunity for speakership, prompting the next unit of telling, and acknowledging the delivered prior turn. In this function, khob can carry a rising or falling final pitch movement; (b) the token can also be used as a tag by the speaker of a telling to elicit recipiency and check the recipient’s understanding of the turn so far. As a tag, khob may or may not solicit a response. Response soliciting and non-soliciting khobs differ in terms of the participants’ gaze behaviour and the coparticipants’ level of engagement in the storytelling, but both types only appear with a final rise in our corpora. Finally, (c) khob can be used as a resumption marker, managing a return to storytelling after it is suspended with an intervening action. Interactions were recorded in Iran.