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The role of intonation in the organization of repair and problem handling sequences in conversation
(1988)
Transcripts of repair and/or problem handling sequences from natural conversations are presented and analyzed with special reference to the role of intonation in the interactive organization of these sequences. It is shown that (a) in the initiation of so-called repair or local problem handling sequences, intonation is used as a type-distinctive device, and (b) in the handling of a global problem handling sequence, intonation is systematically used as a means to constitute and control participant cooperation. In general, intonation is analyzed as one contextualization cue cooccurring with specific syntactic, semantic and discourse organizational devices to signal the status of an utterance in conversational context. It is hypothesized that especially in the global problem handling sequence, different categories of intonation, i.e. different accent and contour types, are systematically used to signal and control participants' interactive problem handling in different, indexically relevant ways simultaneously.
Content: 1. Introduction 2. The notion of speech style: from a dependent variable to contextualization cue 3. Speech styles in conversation from a German Sozialamt 3.1 Extracts from conversation 3.2 Speech style constituting cues 3.3 Choice and alternation of speech styles in conversation 4. Summary and conclusions
My analysis of question-word questions in conversational question-answer sequences results in the decomposition of the conversational question into three systems of constitutive cues, which signal and contextualize the particular activity type in conversational interaction: (1) syntactic structure, (2) semantic relation to prior turn, and (3) prosody. These components are used and combined by interlocutors to distinguish between different activity types which (4) sequentially implicate different types of answers by the recipient in the next turn. Prosody is only one cooccurring cue, but in some cases it is the only distinctive one. It is shown that prosody, and in particular intonation, cannot be determined or even systematically related to syntactic sentence structure type or other sentence-grammatical principles, as most former and current theories of intonation postulate. Instead, prosody is an independent, autonomous signalling system, which is used as a contextualization device for the constitution of interactively relevant activity types in conversation.
On the basis of our data from telephone and face-to-face conversations between adolescent girls and young women of ethnic Turkish background who live in Berlin, we will describe some characteristic structures of the ethnic style of speaking that is called 'Turkendeutsch', 'Turkenslang', 'Kanak sprak' or the like. In our data, this style of speaking is not deployed throughout the speakers' conversations, butonly in particular turns and turn-constructional units (TCUs). The utterances most typical of this style exhibit specific combinations of syntactic and prosodic features that are unusual for colloquial and/or regionalized varieties of German. Among the structures recurrently found are specific kinds of pre- and post-positioned constituents before and after their 'host' sentences, the separation of turn-constructional units into very short prosodic units, the deployment of both lexical stress as well as utterance accentuation as a resource for stylistic variation, and the constitution of particular rhythmic patterns. In our paper, we will discuss some of these structures and show how they arc used its a resource to achieve particular tasks in conversational interaction.