Ja, goed idee! Arranging joint future activities as a 'Big Package' in Dutch phone conversations

Abstract

Arrangement-making is an important part of daily life and even a simple get-together may require a longer stretch of such preparatory talk. Using the method of conversation analysis and building on Heritage and Clayman's (2024) work on arrangement-making packages in English, this thesis analyzes the way arrangements are made in spontaneous Dutch telephone conversations. This research places itself in the context of work on longer stretches of talk, also known as long sequences (Sacks, 1995) or big packages (Jefferson, 1988). The analysis first takes a broad perspective of the arrangement-making package as a whole, concentrating on the boundaries that set it apart from the conversation in which it is embedded. For the beginning of the arrangement-making process, some of the ways in which participants signal shared knowledge, for example through discourse particles, are explored, while at the end of the package, some practices for confirming the agreed upon plan or for postponing the final arrangements to a later time are addressed. Subsequently, the analysis zooms in on a specific linguistic resource, 'anders dan' (otherwise), and its role in the body of the package. I show that this adverbial expression is found both in extended turns and at the beginning of a new turn. In the latter position, it can serve to propose an alternative to an arrangement solution being pursued, allowing for closure of the arrangement-making segment or package. Data are from the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (Corpus of Spoken Dutch).