International audience Conversational feedback is mostly performed through shortutterances such as yeah, mhmm, okay not produced by themain speaker but by one of the other participants of a con-versation. Such utterances are among the most frequentin conversational data. They also have been described inpsycho-linguistic models of communication as a crucialcommunicative tool for achieving coordination or align-ment in dialogue. The newly funded project describedin this paper addresses this issue from a linguistic view-point by combining fine-grained corpus linguistic anal-yses of semi-controlled data with formal and statisticalmodeling. The impoverished aspect of the linguistic ma-terial present in these utterances allows for a truly multi-dimensional analysis that can explain how different lin-guistic domains combine to convey meaning and achievecommunicative goals.