Prosody in Conversation: Interactional Studies

by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Margret Selting

Overview

The essays in this volume are all analyses of prosody—primarily intonation and rhythm—and the role it plays in everyday conversation. Prosody emerges as a strategy deployed by interactants in the management of turn-taking and floor-holding; in the negotiation of conversational activities such as repair, assessments, announcements, reproaches and news receipts; and in the keying of the tone or modality of interactional sequences. The material studied is taken not from constructed laboratory data but from genuine English, German and Italian conversations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521024105
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/13/2006
Series:	Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics , #12
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	484
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.14(d)

Table of Contents

List of contributors; Foreword by John J. Cumperz; Introduction; 1. Towards an interactional perspective on prosody and a prosodic perspective on interaction Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Margret Selting; 2. On the prosody and syntax of turn-continuations Peter Auer; 3. Ending up in Ulster: prosody and turn-taking in English dialects Bill Wells and Sue Peppé; 4. Affiliating and disaffiliating with continuers: prosodic aspects of recipiency Frank Ernst Müller; 5. Conversational phonetics: some aspects of news receipts in everyday talk John Local; 6. Prosody as an activity-type distinctive cue in conversation: the case of so-called 'astonished' questions in repair initiation Margret Selting; 7. The prosodic contextualization of moral work: an analysis of reproaches in 'why'-formats Susanne Günther; 8. On rhythm in everyday German conversation: beat clashes in assessment utterances Susanne Uhmann; 9. The prosody of repetition: on quoting and mimicry Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen; 10. Working on young children's utterances: prosodic aspects of repetition during picture labelling Clare Tarplee; 11. Informings and announcements in their environment: prosody within a multi-activity work setting Marjorie Harness Goodwin; Indexes.

Editorial Reviews

"This is a compelling, innovative, and outstandingly well-edited collection; it deserves to be read not only by those interested in all aspects of prosody, but also by those studying conversation...and other forms of language use in interaction." Paul Drew, Language in Society

From the Publisher