About the Book
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.
Table of Contents:
1. Foreword; 2. Preface; 3. List of contributors; 4. Introduction; 5. Prosody in interaction: State of the art (by Selting, Margret); 6. Future prospects of research on prosody: The need for publicly available corpora: Comments on Margret Selting "Prosody in interaction: State of the art" (by Deppermann, Arnulf); 7. Part I. Prosody and other levels of linguistic organization in interaction; 8. The phonetic constitution of a turn-holding practice: Rush-throughs in English talk-in-interaction (by Walker, Gareth); 9. Rush-throughs as social action: Comments on Gareth Walker "The phonetic constitution of a turn-holding practice: Rush-throughs in English talk-in-interaction" (by Gunthner, Susanne); 10. Prosodic constructions in making complaints (by Ogden, Richard); 11. The relevance of context to the performing of a complaint: Comments on Richard Ogden "Prosodic constructions in making complaints" (by Hakulinen, Auli); 12. Prosodic variation in responses: The case of type-conforming responses to yes/no interrogatives (by Raymond, Geoffrey); 13. Retrieving, redoing and resuscitating turns in conversation (by Local, John); 14. Doing confirmation with ja/nee hoor: Sequential and prosodic characteristics of a Dutch discourse particle (by Mazeland, Harrie); 15. Part II. Prosodic units as a structuring device in interaction; 16. Intonation phrases in natural conversation: A participants' category? (by Szczepek Reed, Beatrice); 17. Making units: Comments on Beatrice Szczepek Reed "Intonation phrases in natural conversation: A participants' category?" (by Anward, Jan); 18. Speaking dramatically: The prosody of live radio commentary of football matches (by Kern, Friederike); 19. Commentating fictive and real sports: Comments on Friederike Kern "Speaking dramatically: The prosody of radio live commentary of football matches" (by Wagner, Johannes); 20. Tonal repetition and tonal contrast in English carer-child interaction (by Wells, Bill); 21. Repetition and contrast across action sequences: Comments on Bill Wells "Tonal repetition and tonal contrast in English carer-child interaction" (by Walker, Traci); 22. Part III. Prosody and other semiotic resources in interaction; 23. Communicating emotion in doctor-patient interaction: A multidimensional single-case analysis (by Gulich, Elisabeth); 24. Double function of prosody: Processes of meaning-making in narrative reconstructions of epileptic seizures: Comments on Elisabeth Gulich and Katrin Lindemann "Communicating emotion in doctor-patient interaction. A multidimensional single-case analysis" (by Reber, Elisabeth); 25. Multimodal expressivity of the Japanese response particle Huun: Displaying involvement without topical engagement (by Tanaka, Hiroko); 26. Response tokens - A multimodal approach: Comments on Hiroko Tanaka "Multimodal expressivity of the Japanese response particle Huun" (by Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar); 27. Multiple practices for constructing laughables (by Ford, Cecilia E.); 28. Multimodal laughing: Comments on Cecilia Ford and Barbara Fox "Multiple practices for constructing laughables" (by Birkner, Karin); 29. Constructing meaning through prosody in aphasia (by Goodwin, Charles); 30. Further perspectives on cooperative semiosis: Comments on Charles Goodwin "Constructing meaning through prosody in aphasia" (by Kotthoff, Helga); 31. Author index; 32. Subject index
Review :
The main advantage of the book is the emphasis placed on experimental, as opposed to impressionistic, phonetics. Moreover, the authors base their research on corpora, highlighting the importance of naturally occurring speech in the analysis of prosody. Yet another crucial factor that contributes to the high quality of the volume is the fact that the papers show an important academic direction which researchers of prosody in interaction may follow. The contributions are thought-provoking, which applies also to the commenting papers which are of immense value to the readers, as they provide them with instantaneous criticism or elaboration of the preceding articles. [...] The volume is a fine collection of papers, which should be of interest to many researchers of interaction and/or prosody.
This wonderful collection of papers contributes to the already longstanding tradition of studies on prosody in interactional linguistics. It pays a significant tribute to the outstanding work done by Elisabeth Couper-Kuhlen who has radically contributed to our understanding of the role of prosody in interaction.The volume not only shows the central role of prosody for the organization of interaction, but also demonstrates the interplay of prosody and other multimodal dimensions, going from syntax to gesture and embodied conducts. In this sense, the volume invites to integrate in a holistic way all of the resources participants mobilize in constructing the emergent order of social interaction.
With contributions from some of our most prominent scholars, Prosody in Interaction honors one of the primary originators of this CA-inspired line of work by offering revealing accounts of the place of prosody in action. There can be no question that prosody plays an indispensable role in producing action in talk-in-interaction, and the contributions to this volume furnish solid empirical evidence of just what roles it plays across languages and circumstances. Accompanying commentaries to most of the contributions give added depth to the volume.
Though the analytic chapters vary in their specific goals, their sources of data, and so on, they hang together well due to their shared focus on the sequential organization of interaction, drawing upon evidence from a combination of current-speaker action and next-speaker action, and in several cases,
embodied as well as spoken. Each takes a detailed, qualitative approach to one interaction at a time, with several authors stating explicitly that the examples they choose to illustrate their points are representative of a larger set of similar cases. In the chapters that use them, acoustic analyses are, overall, rigorous and convincing. The commenting chapters encourage the reader to think more deeply about some aspect(s) of the preceding chapter; I found these to enhance the reading experience greatly. It cannot be overstated how helpful the accompanying website was for reading this book. Being able to hear, and in many cases watch, interactions unfold -- and being able to listen to clips of individual words and phrases that are the focus of an author’s analysis -- made the analysis come to life. I believe this feature of the book can serve as an example for any publications that take sound variation into account for an analysis of interaction.
It is most fascinating how much has been found out about the previously elusive medium of prosody since a small group of scholars have begun to investigate it within the environment in which it has evolved and keeps evolving, social interaction. This book provides us with a thorough understanding of the systematic ways in which we use the musical parameters of speech — melody, voice, rhythm — to manage interactions and social relationships, beat by beat, turn by turn. We learn to appreciate the immense range of social and symbolic tasks accomplished by prosodic choices and formats, as well as the wealth of research that is still to be done.
The volume Prosody in Interaction provides a multi-faceted collection of papers addressing a variety of prosodic aspects and the roles they play in spoken natural interaction. It impressively reflects the establishment of the conversation analytic and interactional linguistic framework over the last decades and confirms the need for a socially-oriented functional analysis of linguistic concepts in spontaneous data. [...]
The book is not only highly relevant for specialists in the field - in fact for all linguists adhering to approaches that deal with prosody or spoken language in general - but also for graduate and undergraduate students of linguistics.
The studies presented are interesting, varied and show much vitality in this research area. The subfield is an important addition to prosodic research, which has largely been focused on controlled settings, and Conversation Analysis, where much of the research has been based on written transcriptions. Also pleasing to see is an effort to incorporate multimodal cues, including gesture and facial expression.
This is a very interesting book on the application of prosody in live communication and is a good read for both students and researchers of the field.
