Prosodic Orientation in English Conversation encompasses the description and analysis of an entirely new interactional phenomenon: the collaborative orientation to prosody in spontaneous conversation. Prosodic orientation is a conversational strategy by which participants in natural talk design the vocal aspects of their speech analogous to the vocal patterns used by others in the immediate conversational context. The findings show that speakers interact with and respond to one another on a purely prosodic level, thus engaging in a form of collaboration which reveals prosody to be treated as an independent domain of conversation. All analyses are based on natural occurrences of everyday talk.
About the Author:
Beatrice Szczepek Reed is Research Fellow in the Centre for English Language Education, University of Nottingham, UK