The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

THE BOOK OF TELLS
the listener looks more intently at the speaker than the
speaker does at the listener. In an Italian conversation it's
not unusual to find the listener looking around, affecting
an air of boredom, while the speaker is constantly moving
around so that he's in front of the listener and using his
hands to try and capture the listener's attention.
Turn-taking in Italy is based on the 'conch shell model'
- so called after the famous scene in William Golding's
Lord of the Flies, where a group of English schoolboys are
marooned on an island. 19 At their first meeting on the
island all the boys start to talk at once, so they make a rule
that from that point onwards only one person will be
allowed to speak at a time - the boy who is holding the
large conch shell that was found on the beach. Italian conversations
conform to the conch shell model, not because
the Italians want to eliminate overlap talk - there's very
little chance of that - but because the person who has his
hands in the air is deemed to be the speaker. 20
In Italy a speaker who wants to retain her role needs to
ensure that her hands are in the air, and that they are
gesticulating and holding the other person's attention. The
listener, on the other hand, does not produce a lot of backchannel,
partly because the speaker doesn't need that
much encouragement to keep talking, and partly because
the listener is less keen about remaining in the role, and
therefore is less interested in offering the speaker a lot of
support. In Italian conversations the listener often withholds
his approval by looking away while the other person
is talking. This can sometimes create a rather theatrical
spectacle, where the speaker is in hot pursuit, trying to
ensnare the listener with wild gesticulations, while the
listener refuses to ratify the speaker by giving the speaker
318