Prosody and turn-taking in Malay broadcast interviews

Abstract

The paper aims to examine the role that prosody plays in constructing the context in which utterances become interpretable. The realisations of some prosodic features at particular loci of occurrence can serve as signalling cues in the management of conversational interaction and in the interpretation of different activity types in conversation. The concern here is to find out exactly how prosody and what prosodic features contribute to this process of contextualisation. In order to identify the contextual function of prosody, we examined the realisations of prosody at turn transitions and within certain types of speaker activity such as turn-holding or turn-yielding and turn-competitive incomings. Examination of the data shows that the completion of turn-constructional units is usually associated with a drop in pitch, and non-completion with rising or sustained pitch. The prosodic features involved in signalling the status of the speaker's overlap as competitive or non-competitive are pitch height and loudness. The giving away of turn is marked by decreased pitch height and diminuendo loudness, gradually reaching the point of unintelligibility; a return competition is signalled by a step-up in pitch and increased loudness, and at times tempo speed-up which usually occurs around the beginning of the return competition.