Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword by John J. Gumperz
- Introduction
- 1 Towards an interactional perspective on prosody and a prosodic perspective on interaction
- 2 On the prosody and syntax of turn-continuations
- 3 Ending up in Ulster: prosody and turn-taking in English dialects
- 4 Affiliating and disaffiliating with continuers: prosodic aspects of recipiency
- 5 Conversational phonetics: some aspects of news receipts in everyday talk
- 6 Prosody as an activity-type distinctive cue in conversation: the case of so-called ‘astonished’ questions in repair initiation
- 7 The prosodic contextualization of moral work: an analysis of reproaches in ‘why’-formats
- 8 On rhythm in everyday German conversation: beat clashes in assessment utterances
- 9 The prosody of repetition: on quoting and mimicry
- 10 Working on young children's utterances: prosodic aspects of repetition during picture labelling
- 11 Informings and announcements in their environment: prosody within a multi-activity work setting
- Subject index
- Index of names
4 - Affiliating and disaffiliating with continuers: prosodic aspects of recipiency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword by John J. Gumperz
- Introduction
- 1 Towards an interactional perspective on prosody and a prosodic perspective on interaction
- 2 On the prosody and syntax of turn-continuations
- 3 Ending up in Ulster: prosody and turn-taking in English dialects
- 4 Affiliating and disaffiliating with continuers: prosodic aspects of recipiency
- 5 Conversational phonetics: some aspects of news receipts in everyday talk
- 6 Prosody as an activity-type distinctive cue in conversation: the case of so-called ‘astonished’ questions in repair initiation
- 7 The prosodic contextualization of moral work: an analysis of reproaches in ‘why’-formats
- 8 On rhythm in everyday German conversation: beat clashes in assessment utterances
- 9 The prosody of repetition: on quoting and mimicry
- 10 Working on young children's utterances: prosodic aspects of repetition during picture labelling
- 11 Informings and announcements in their environment: prosody within a multi-activity work setting
- Subject index
- Index of names
Summary
Introduction
A task for any description dealing with the use of spoken language in natural situations is to account for the radical interdependency of speaking and listening. Speakers, in the very act of speaking, i.e. when holding a turn, are at the same time also listeners. They perceive the responses coming from listeners and may instantly, in their speaking, react to them and modify their course (see Jefferson 1973). Listeners, on the other hand, even though maintaining their stance as recipients of the developing turn of a current speaker, act at the same time to some degree as speakers: listening is an activity that has a global ecology, comprising facial, proxemic, gestural and bodily signals as well as purely verbal ones. Yet it also has a vocal, verbal and linguistic side: with small tokens like ‘hm’, ‘uh huh’, ‘yeah’, ‘yes’, ‘right’, etc., which a ‘listener may get in edgewise’ (Yngve 1970), which ‘may come between sentences’ (Schegloff 1982) or which act as ‘bridges between turn-constructional units’ (Goodwin 1986), recipients track the course of emerging talk in discourse, and display, in brief, their current understanding of that talk, co-constituting its continuation. It is in this limited sense, restricted to the small but still hearable, linguistic tokens inserted into the ongoing talk of a current speaker, that the term ‘recipiency’ will be used in the following.
To do the ‘intermediate’ work they do, the tokens of recipiency must remain brief and unobtrusive – they are designed to fit into slight gaps of ongoing talk and usually avoid obliterating parts of the ongoing talk to which they refer.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Prosody in ConversationInteractional Studies, pp. 131 - 176Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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