Abstract
This article examines prosody in interaction in the context of a 66 minute meeting to agree on assessment marks as part of a pilot project studying assessment procedures. The data is drawn from a larger set of data of approximately 10 hours of academic meetings. The three participants are female colleagues involved in English Language teaching. The raw data in the audio file was subjected to a three stage process of annotation, analysis and presentation. Findings show that particles can be sorted into emotive particles, artefacts of vocalisation, and those concerned with the sharing of knowledge between speaker and addressee. They can also be classified according to their relationship to speech, and whether or not they are linguistically and phonologically organised. What is also interesting is that when prosody co-occurs with particles it operates in a different way than when it illustrates syntactic or information structure or plays a role in turn taking. Prosody appears to operate as an independent component of particles, using salience to draw attention, or lack of salience to accompany activities which are not intended as interruptions. Keywords: prosody; academic meeting; particles; English language; interaction DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2203-02
Highlights
Prosody straddles the boundary between linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena
We address two questions: What particles are the typical responses that mark the end of turn-constructional units (TCUs), and what are their phonetic form and the associated prosody
The meaning of a particle is its use in a system of communication, this use being measured by its distribution
Summary
Prosody straddles the boundary between linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena. In the study of prosody there has always been a minority interest in going beyond linguistic structure (Bolinger 1972, 1986, 1989; Barth-Weingarten, Dehé & Wichmann,2009 for the contribution of prosody to meaning). Kingdon (1958) and Crystal (1969) presented a wide range of prosodic phenomena going far beyond linguistic information, and O'Connor and Arnold (1973) sought to trace in particular the connection between prosody and attitude (Monetta, Cheang & Pell 2013). Even in the case of prepared speech (Knowles, Williams & Taylor 1996), the prosody is undoubtedly largely concerned with reflecting syntactic and information structure, there is a residue that at the present state of knowledge is difficult or impossible to explain. This residue includes a number of particles such as [ə] and [m], some of which are clearly not part of language. These particles have been chosen for study here because they make a useful link between the familiar territory of language and terra incognita beyond
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