Prosody in Conversation: Interactional Studies (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics)

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.

• Takes a genuinely empirical approach to the study of prosody in naturally occurring verbal interaction • Advocates an innovative methodology combining insights from prosodic research, conversation analysis and contextualization theory • Contains individual studies of the role of prosody with respect to turn-taking, activity sequences, tone and modality

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.