Prosodic orientation

Abstract

Prosody has been widely shown to be a relevant parameter for conversation.1 Participants show their awareness and recognition of other speakers’ prosody by designing their own talk according to the relevancies opened up by the prosodic design of previous turns. For example, they orient to another participant’s prosodic turn-completion, as it co-occurs with other sequential, syntactic and semantico-pragmatic completion signals, by coming in with their own next turn; they interpret a syntactically complete statement as a question on the basis of its rising final intonation; and they recognize another speaker’s held glottal stop as a turn holding signal. From these examples it can be said that participants ‘orient’ to previous speakers’ prosody in a basic, conversation analytic sense of the term, as described by Hutchby and Wooffitt (1998: 15):

Throughout the course of a conversation or other bout of talk-ininteraction, speakers display in their sequentially ‘next’ turns an understanding of what the ‘prior’ turn was about … We describe this as a next-turn-proof-procedure, and it is the most basic tool used in CA to ensure that analyses explicate the orderly properties of talk as oriented-to accomplishments of participants, rather than being based merely on the assumptions of the analyst. (Emphasis mine)