Gender, interaction and intonational variation: The discourse functions of High Rising Terminals in London

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the different conversational and interactional functions that High Rising Terminals (HRT) fulfil among young, White, middle‐class speakers of London English. Data are drawn from sixteen small‐group interviews with forty‐two individuals (28 women and 14 men) aged 18–25. From this corpus, 7351 declarative Intonation Phrases were extracted, and auditorily coded for the presence/absence of HRT as well as for a variety of social, interactional and pragmatic factors. I combine quantitative and qualitative methods to demonstrate that while all of the speakers investigated use HRT to accomplish relational work in conversation, the specific interactional strategies that the feature is recruited to perform differ markedly across genders. I consider the ramifications of this finding for our understanding of ‘politeness’ as a gendered practice, and illustrate the importance of examining a variable like HRT in its discourse‐functional context.

Same difference: the phonetic shape of High Rising Terminals in London

“…Based on quantitative findings such as these, as well as additional qualitative evidence, I argue in Levon (2016) that HRTs serve distinct pragmatic functions for White women and White men in London. In short, I…”

“…For both the White women and the White men in the sample, the prevalence of HRTs varies according to the type of speech act in which they are engaged. Using a taxonomy of speech act types developed by Guy et al (1986) for the analysis of HRTs in Australia, results in Levon (2016) demonstrate that among the women the statement of facts contain the least amount of HRTs, the recounting of narratives the most, with opinions, descriptions and explanations falling somewhere in between. This pattern replicates what has been found elsewhere (e.g., Guy et al 1986 for Australia and Britain 1992 for New Zealand), and supports an interpretation of HRTs as a tool for helping to structure conversational interaction.…”

“…In this article, I address one such stalemate that arises in the analysis of High Rising Terminal (HRT) contours on declarative utterances in London English. 1 In previous work (Levon 2016), I demonstrate that there are two pragmatically distinct meanings of HRTs in the region, distributed across different group of users and conversational contexts. Given the different 1 The term HRT is used to cover a number of different intonational phenomena in the literature, including both rising tunes on declaratives and rising tunes in general (i.e., in various kinds of questions as well).…”

Social meaning in semantics and pragmatics

“…Politeness inferences have been semantically motivated also in association with intonational variables such as rising declaratives—that is, assertions made with interrogative contour as in John has a sister? (Levon, 2016; McLemore, 1991; Podesva, 2011). Jeong (2018, 2019) links these effects to the particular type of discourse update contributed by these moves—and specifically the fact that they raise a metalinguistic issue about whether such a proposition is a good enough answer to the question under discussion; it is the act of involving the interlocutor in assessing the relevance of their own discourse move that serves as a tool to build rapport with them, and hence as a strategy to enhance politeness in most contexts (see also Levon, 2016).…”

“…(Levon, 2016; McLemore, 1991; Podesva, 2011). Jeong (2018, 2019) links these effects to the particular type of discourse update contributed by these moves—and specifically the fact that they raise a metalinguistic issue about whether such a proposition is a good enough answer to the question under discussion; it is the act of involving the interlocutor in assessing the relevance of their own discourse move that serves as a tool to build rapport with them, and hence as a strategy to enhance politeness in most contexts (see also Levon, 2016). Finally, Hilton (2018) suggests that politeness inferences also arise in connection to the broader pragmatic relations between speaking turns in a conversation; for instance, speakers who abruptly change the topic are perceived to be interrupting—and socially evaluated accordingly—even if they did not overlap with their interlocutor.…”