Open Access

In her overview, Margret Selting makes the case for the claim that dealing with authentic conversation necessarily lies at the heart of an interactionallinguistic approach to prosody (see Selting this volume, Section 3.3). However, collecting and transcribing corpora of authentic interaction is a time-consuming enterprise. This fact often severely restricts what the individual researcher is able to do in terms of analysis within the scope of his or her resources. Still, for dealing with many of the desiderata Margret Selting points out in Section 5 of her extensive overview, the use of larger corpora seems to be required. In this commenting paper, I want to argue that future progress in research on prosody in interaction will essentially rest on the availability and use of large public corpora. After reviewing arguments for and against the use of public corpora, I will discuss some upshots regarding corpus design and issues of transcription of public corpora.

This paper contributes to the growing body of knowledge on current listeners' responses in talk-in-interaction. In particular, it complements earlier findings on double sayings of German JA by describing some additional prosodic-phonetic parameters and a visual feature of its realization in institutional and semi-private interaction (doctor-patient interaction, Big Brother, TV talk shows). These include pitch contour, pitch range and phonetic ending, on the one hand, and nodding on the other. The paper shows that JAJA is a truly multimodal phenomenon, with the individual features accomplishing interactional functions across sequence-organizational habitats, including re)claiming epistemic priority in an aside, making continuation relevant, agreeing/ acknowledging with reservation and aligning with the continuation of a sequence. Lack of nodding is suggested to have situational as well as misalignment reasons. On the basis of its observations, the paper also raises the question whether it is the applicability of response token variants across action and sequence types which makes them memorizable despite their variability.

The parallel-opposition construction has not yet been widely described as an independent construction type. This article reports on its realization in everyday British-English conversation. In particular, it focusses on prosodic projection in the lexically and syntactically unmarked first component of this syntactic pattern, and thus adds to the body of research investigating the organization of turn-taking in the context of bi-clausal constructions with which the first part lacks explicit lexical hints to their continuation. It is shown that the parallel-opposition construction, next to specific semantic–pragmatic, syntactic and lexical features, also exhibits a relatively fixed range of prosodic features in the first conjunct, among these narrow focus, continuing intonation and/or the avoidance of intonation-unit boundary signals. These are used to project continuation of an otherwise complete utterance and, thus, to secure the floor for the expression of contrast. In addition, the detailed analysis of apparently deviant cases, which takes into account the on-line production of syntax, shows that a lack of prosodically projective features in the first component of the parallel-opposition construction can be explained by the strategic, retrospective use of the construction to resolve problems in turn transition.