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Sequences from natural conversations, which are in ethnomethodological conversational analysis analyzed as "other-initiated self-repair", are here described as sequences in which participants manifest and treat local problems of understanding. This approach, which takes participants' perspectives into account, shows that these sequences have a detailed internal structure: - Participants use different types of problem manifestation to signal different types of problems of understanding; syntactic and prosodic cues are used as type-differentiating devices in problem manifestation; for different types of problems different assumptions with respect to the degree of reciprocity can be reconstructed as underlying problem manifestation and problem treatment. - There is a relation of conditional relevance holding between specific types of problem manifestation and specific types of problem treatment. - Problem types are ordered in relation to each other in terms of preference structures. Thus, an analysis which takes participants' perspectives into account and which looks more closely at linguistic signalling cues allows to differentiate between various types of internal structures within so-called repair sequences.
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.
Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es zu zeigen, daß und weshalb Intonationsmodelle, die die Prämissen des traditionellen systemisch-tonetischen Ansatzes teilen, ungeeignet sind für die Analyse natürlicher Sprachverwendung in konversationeller Interaktion. Insbesondere die Grundeinheit der 'Tpngruppe'/'Toneinheit'/'Intonationsphrase' wie auch die Analyse des 'Tonmusters' bzw. der letzten Tonhöhenbewegung der Einheit im Hinblick auf die Unterscheidung und Differenzierung von Satzarten bzw. Satzmodi sind auf die Analyse kontextfreier Sätze zugeschnitten und kaum auf die Verhältnisse der Sprachverwendung in natürlicher konversationeller Interaktion übertragbar. Eine alternative Analyse der Intonation als interaktiv relevantes Signalisierungssystem ermöglicht bessere und plausiblere Beschreibungen. Nleine alternative Konzeption basiert auf der empirischen Analyse eines Korpus natürlicher Daten aus informellen Alltagsgesprächen. Das Ergebnis dieser Analyse ist, daß Intonation als unabhängiges, autonomes Signalisierungssystem aufgefaßt werden muß. Für die derzeit üblichen Ansätze der phonologischen Intonationsforschung ergibt sich die Forderung nach noch stärkerer als bisher angenommener Modularisierung: Zwar steht die Wahl der Akzentstelle in systematischer Beziehung zu grammatischen Prinzipien und muß mit Bezug auf die Grammatik analysiert werden, aber die Wahl der Tonhöhenbewegung kann nicht mit Bezug auf die Grammatik erklärt werden: die letzte Tonhöhenbewegung unterscheidet nicht grammatisch relevante Satzarten/Satzmodi, sondern interaktiv relevante Aktivitätstypen in der konversationeilen Interaktion, die auch je unterschiedliehe sequentielle Implikationen für die konditioneil relevante Antwort haben.
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.
Lists as embedded structures and the prosody of list construction as an interactional resource
(2003)
Lists as embedded structures and the prosody of list construction as an interactional resource
(2007)
After giving an overview of the treatment of lists in the literature, I describe lists in German talk-in- interaction. I show that, apart from the preference for three-part lists described by Jefferson (1990), lists are embedded in a larger three-component structure that the list is the middle part of. For lists proper, I suggest to differentiate between closed and open lists that are produced with different kinds of practices. It is the prosody that is used to suggest the list as made up of a closed or an open number of list items, irrespective of its syntactic embedding. I then concentrate on open lists, in particular their intonation. Open lists may be produced with different kinds of, albeit similar, intonation contours. But it is not so much the particular intonation contour that is constitutive of lists, but a variety of similar contours plus the repetition of the chosen contour for at least some or even all of the list items. Furthermore, intonation is deployed to suggest the interpretation of a potential final list item as either a designed list completer or as another designed item of the list. The design of this final list item as a completer or as another list item is used as a practice to signal the non-completion or completion of the list proper. But even after completing the list proper, the larger three-component structure also has to be closed in order to embed and accommodate the list into the surrounding sequential interaction. For the analysis of the practices of list construction I am concentrating on the role of prosody, especially intonation, giving evidence to show that intonation is indeed one of the methodically used constitutive cues that makes the production and structuring of lists recognizable for recipients.