Margret Selting

Elisabeth Reber

Dagmar Barth-Weingarten

Prosody is constitutive for spoken interaction. In more than 25 years, its study has grown into a full-fledged and very productive field with a sound catalogue of research methods and principles. This volume presents the state of the art, illustrates current research trends and uncovers potential directions for future research. It will therefore be of major interest to everyone studying spoken interaction. The collection brings together an impressive range of internationally renowned scholars from different, yet closely related and compatible research traditions which have made a significant contribution to the field. They cover issues such as the units of language, the contextualization of actions and activities, conversational modalities and genres, the display of affect and emotion, the multimodality of interaction, language acquisition and aphasia. All contributions are based on empirical, audio- and/or video-recorded data of natural talk-in-interaction, including languages such as English, German and Japanese. The methodologies employed come from Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics.

Prosody in Interaction

Eine empirische Analyse am Beispiel der Bürger-Verwaltungs-Kommunikation

Verständigungsprobleme

Friederike Kern

Ethnic ways of speaking by young people with migrant background have become an important research object in sociolinguistics; work on these ways of speaking has been prospering in many European countries. This title brings together various research designs which explore the phenomenon from different perspectives

Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas

Gegenstand der Arbeit ist die Rolle der Prosodie, v.a. der Intonation im Zusammenspiel mit Lautstärke und Länge, bei der Organisation der alltäglichen Konversation. Sie basiert auf der empirischen Analyse eines Korpus natürlicher Alltagsgespräche. Nach der Darstellung der Zielsetzung und Methodologie der interaktionalen Phonologie der Konversation befassen sich die zentralen Kapitel der Arbeit mit der Rolle der Prosodie bei der Konstruktion von Äußerungseinheiten und Gesprächsbeiträgen, dem Verhältnis von Prosodie und Grammatik bei der Signalisierung konversationeller Fragen und der Rolle der Prosodie beim Erzählen und Argumentieren. Die interaktive Relevanz prosodischer Kategorien als 'Teilnehmerkategorien' wird nachgewiesen, indem gezeigt wird, daß und wie Teilnehmer in Konversationen prosodische Kategorien als Ressource für die Organisation des Gesprächs verwenden und interpretieren und sie aufgrund dieser Interpretation in ihren Folgeaktionen auf bestimmte Weise behandeln. Alle Analysen dieser Arbeit zeigen, daß prosodische Kategorien im Zusammenspiel mit grammatischen, semantischen und sequentiellen Kategorien eine konkrete und in der Interaktion nachweisbare Relevanz haben und genau auf die Erfordernisse der Gesprächsorganisation zugeschnitten sind. Wir verwenden sie als konstitutive Signale bei unserer Herstellung und Interpretation sprachlicher Aktivitäten. Keine einzige Äußerung scheint ohne die Einbeziehung der Prosodie hinreichend vollständig und distinktiv als sprachliche Handlung in natürlichen Gesprächen analysierbar zu sein.

Aspekte einer interaktionalen Phonologie der Konversation

Prosodie im Gespräch

In recent years, ethnic ways of speaking by young people with migrant background have become an important research object in sociolinguistics; work on these ways of speaking has been prospering in many European countries. This work is continued in the present volume, with the aim of bringing together various research designs which explore the phenomenon from different perspectives: correlational methodology of sociolinguistic research, conversation analytical and interactional linguistic methodology, and an ethnographic perspective on language use and the construction of social identities and social relations. The aim of the volume is to explore the scope of these different methodologies and to provide a basis for the discussion and evaluation of the theories of language variation associated with them. All papers focus on the description of the linguistic characteristics that constitute the non-standard structures of ethnic styles of speaking, and look into their various functions in discourse.

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen

"Reviewing recent findings on linguistic practices used in turn construction and turn taking, repair, action formation and ascription, sequence and topic organization, the book examines the way linguistic units of varying size - sentences, clauses, phrases, clause combinations, particles - are mobilized for the implementation of specific actions in talk-in-interaction. A final chapter discusses the implications of an interactional perspective for our understanding of language as well as its variation, diversity, and universality. Supplementary online chapters explore additional topics such as the linguistic organization of preference, stance, footing, and storytelling, as well as the use of prosody and phonetics, and further practices with language"--

An Introduction to Language in Social Interaction

Interactional Linguistics

Current interactional linguistic research appears to be crystallizing around systematic themes, which are all represented in this collection of papers. In the first section, where the relation between language and interaction is viewed from the perspective of language structure, several articles deal with the potential of a single structure for both turn and sequence construction, revealing a play-off between planned and occasioned syntax with potentially far-reaching consequences for language development. Other articles deal with lexical expressions as resources for the conduct of interaction, showing how they are heavily dependent on turn position and sequential context for their meaning potential. In the second section, with a view from the perspective of the interactional order, a systematic focus of interest lies on three different conversational tasks: projecting turn and turn-unit completion, starting up turns with ‘non-beginnings’ and self-repairing. The cross-linguistic studies here all agree that common interactional tasks may well be carried out by quite different linguistic practices and that these practices are dependent to a certain extent on language features which are typologically distinct.

Studies in Interactional Linguistics

Current interactional linguistic research appears to be crystallizing around systematic themes, which are all represented in this collection of papers. In the first section, where the relation between language and interaction is viewed from the perspective of language structure, several articles deal with the potential of a single structure for both turn and sequence construction, revealing a play-off between planned and occasioned syntax with potentially far-reaching consequences for language development. Other articles deal with lexical expressions as resources for the conduct of interaction, showing how they are heavily dependent on turn position and sequential context for their meaning potential. In the second section, with a view from the perspective of the interactional order, a systematic focus of interest lies on three different conversational tasks: projecting turn and turn-unit completion, starting up turns with 'non-beginnings' and self-repairing. The cross-linguistic studies here all agree that common interactional tasks may well be carried out by quite different linguistic practices and that these practices are dependent to a certain extent on language features which are typologically distinct.

Professor of Linguistics Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen

Paul Drew

These essays study the role of prosody in everyday English, German, and Italian conversation.

Margret Selting

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