Overlaps in Maltese conversational and task-oriented dialogues

Abstract

This paper deals with overlaps in spoken Maltese. Overlaps are studied in two different corpora recorded in different communicative situations. One is a multimodal corpus involving first acquaintance conversations; the other consists of Map Task dialogues. The results show that the number of overlaps is larger in the free conversations, where it varies depending on specific aspects of the interaction. They also show that overlaps in the MapTask dialogues tend to be longer, serving the function of establishing common understanding to achieve optimal task completion.