No abstract

Investigations into the management of turn-taking have typically focussed on pitch and other prosodic phenomena, particularly pitch-accents. Here, non-pitch phonetic features and their role in turn-taking are described. Through sustained phonetic and interactional analysis of a naturally occurring, 12-minute long telephone call between two adult speakers of British English, sets of talk-projecting and turn-projecting features are identified. Talk-projecting features include the avoidance of durational lengthening, articulatory anticipation, continuation of voicing, the production of talk in maximally close proximity to a preceding point of possible turn-completion, and the reduction of consonants and vowels. Turn-projecting features include the converse of each of the talk-projecting features, and two other distinct features: release of plosives at the point of possible turn-completion, and the production of audible outbreaths. We show that features of articulatory and phonatory quality and duration are relevant factors in the design and treatment of talk as talk-or turn-projective.

Some small changes may have occurred after this version was sent to publication. The final published version should be consulted before quoting or discussing in detail.

We describe and exemplify a methodology for providing an integratedaccount of the communicative function of parametric phonetic detail and its rela-tionshipwith interactional organization. We exemplify our analytic approach bydocumenting two different phonetic designs of stand-alone ‘so’ in a corpus ofrecorded American English telephone conversations. These two designs - whichencompass particular loudness, pitch and laryngeal characteristics - correlate withdifferent communicative functions and have different consequences for the inter-actional-sequential organization of the talk. We argue that if phonology is to betruly concerned with function and linguistic contrast, we need to induce thosefunctions and domains of contrast from a thoroughgoing phonetic and sequentialanalysis of talk-in-interaction.

This report is based on phonetic and interactional analysis of a collection of increments drawn from audio recordings of British and North American talk-in-interaction. An increment is a grammatically fitted continuation of a turn at talk following the reaching of a point of possible syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic completion. Parametric phonetic analysis reveals that a range of phonetic parameters (including pitch, loudness, rate of articulation, and articulatory characteristics) mark out an increment as a continuation of its host. Interactional analysis reveals that increments deal with a range of interactional exigencies including, but not limited to, possible problems of understanding and alignment arising from the host turn.