In Estonian telemarketing calls the particles
jah, jaa and jajaa make up a separate turn
of an adjacency pair, occurring as its second part used in answer
to asking confirmation or affirmation, to accept an offer or
proposal, and to accept an end signal. The particle jah
is a type-conforming answer to a question offering answer and
to an offer. It is also the main agent of repair in a repair
sequence. The marketeer will initiate a repair sequence by clarification
or reformulation and in most cases the client will confirm their
version by using the particle jah. In telemarketing calls the
type-conforming answer to effect repair is thus jah, not
jajaa, which was used not even once. In our material repairs
were accomplished only by affirmations or confirmations on the
part of clients, which means that repairs were initiated exclusively
by the marketeers. Why no client ever initiated a repair is a
subject beyond this paper.
The hypothesis that jaa could perhaps be a phonetic or
pragmatic variant of jah was not proved by our material.
On the contrary, there is reason to believe that the particle
jaa has a usage environment of its own. The use of jaa
in answer to a statement is relatively frequent as compared to
reactions to other first parts of the adjacency pair, which indicates
that for the particle jaa reaction to a statement may
be a homeplace.
