1 - Towards an interactional perspective on prosody and a prosodic perspective on interaction

Summary

Introduction

If prosody is understood to comprise the ‘musical’ attributes of speech – auditory effects such as melody, dynamics, rhythm, tempo and pause – then it is surely no exaggeration to state that a large part of this field has been left untilled by modern structural linguistics. Only a few scholars at the most have considered prosody, intonation in particular, worthy of their attention. Moreover, when they have done so, it has been primarily in structuralist terms. Speech melodies and rhythms have been pursued as a part of language competence, analysed in minimal pairs as if they were phoneme- or morpheme-like entities with distinctive functions. More socially oriented approaches to the study of language, by contrast, have openly acknowledged the importance of prosodic phenomena in language-in-use but have not put their words into practice or have done so in an intuitive, pre-theoretical way which does not reflect the state of current prosodic research. In this chapter we shall argue that bringing together these two fields of inquiry, speech prosody and language-in-use, and allowing them to crossfertilize will help to overcome a number of the weaknesses which have become apparent in the current praxis of each.

In retrospect, it is doubtless the overwhelming influence of literacy on thinking about language which has been responsible for the neglect of prosody. Language, perhaps unconsciously, has been equated with ‘prose’, those linguistic forms put down in writing and intended to be read. Given that prosodic phenomena (i) are not segment-based, referential units, (ii) are gradient rather than discrete, and (iii) lack systematic codification in writing, it is perhaps not surprising that they are so often ignored.