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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 presents the concept of the "participant perspective" as an approach to the study of spoken language. It discusses three aspects of this concept and shows that they can offer helpful tools in spoken language research. Employing the participant perspective provides us with an alternative to many of the approaches currently in use in the study of spoken language in that it favours small-scale, qualitative research that aims to uncover categories relevant for the participants. Its results can usefully complement large-scale studies of phenomena on all linguistic dimensions of talk.
The term “pivot” usually refers to two overlapping syntactic units such that the completion of the first unit simultaneously launches the second. In addition, pivots are generally said to be characterized by the smooth prosodic integration of their syntactic parts. This prosodic integration is typically achieved by prosodic-phonetic matching of the pivot components. As research on such turns in a range of languages has illustrated, speakers routinely deploy pivots so as to be able to continue past a point of possible turn completion, in the service of implementing some additional or revised action. This article seeks to build on, and complement, earlier research by exploring two issues in more detail as follows: (1) what exactly do pivotal turn extensions accomplish on the action dimension, and (2) what role does prosodic-phonetic packaging play in this? We will show that pivot constructions not only exhibit various degrees of prosodic-phonetic (non-)integration, i.e., differently strong cesuras, but that they can be ordered on a continuum, and that this cline maps onto the relationship of the actions accomplished by the components of the pivot construction. While tighter prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., weak(er) cesuring, co-occurs with post-pivot actions whose relationship to that of the pre-pivot tends to be rather retrospective in character, looser prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., strong(er) cesuring, is associated with a more prospective orientation of the post-pivot’s action. These observations also raise more general questions with regard to the analysis of action.