What Does že jo (and že ne) Mean in Spoken Dialogue

The goal of this paper is to examine the role of two collocations (že jo and že ne) in spoken dialogue. Both are said to be typical of spontaneous conversation and express a large scale of pragmatic functions, e.g. uncertainty of the speaker or a request for a backchannel. The examination of their positioning within the utterance in relation to the meaning of their close context helped us to identify the functions and to distinguish between cases which are simple co-occurrences of the conjunction že and the particle jo/ne, and those which are instances of the set phrase. The source material comes from the ORAL2013 and DIALOG corpora.