Couper-Kuhlen1998
| Couper-Kuhlen1998 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Couper-Kuhlen1998 |
| Author(s) | Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen |
| Title | Coherent Voicing. On Prosody in Conversational Reported Speech |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | IL, Prosody, Reported Speech |
| Publisher | |
| Year | 1998 |
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| Journal | InLiSt - Interaction and Linguistic Structures |
| Volume | 1 |
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| URL | Link |
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Abstract
Goffman has pointed out that interlocutors in the course of any natural conversation are constantly changing the footing of their talk. In Goffman’s usage, this term refers to the alignment which speakers take up to themselves and to others as evidenced by the way they handle the production and reception of utterances (1981:128). Changes in footing may involve different reception roles or different production roles or both (Goffman 1981:226ff; also Levinson 1988), and they are commonly understood to be signaled inter alia by prosodic cues and code-switching, which contextualize the particular footing or participant framework currently relevant (Gumperz 1982, Tannen, ed. 1993). Yet precisely how this contextualization is accomplished and what specific contribution prosody makes to the ‘management’ of footing has not yet been fully spelled out1 — at least not for all types of shift. The present paper addresses one of the most frequent shifts of footing, namely that occasioned by the use of reported speech in conversation. What happens with reported speech is that the unity within a single speaker of the three production roles which Goffman identifies — animator, author and principal — dissolves, leaving the role of animator separate from, and independent of, those of author and/or principal. The ‘reporting’ speaker animates or voices a ‘reported’ figure without necessarily composing the words which this figure is made to utter or espousing the beliefs which the figure’s words will be heard as attesting to.2 The question which the ‘voicing’ of figures raises for a prosodist is whether and to what extent the speaker’s phonatory voice is instrumental in the process.3 Using a methodology developed by crossing prosodic analysis with conversation analysis (Couper-Kuhlen/Selting 1996), this paper attempts to pin down exactly which tasks the ‘voicing’ of reported speech confronts conversationalists with and how speakers’ prosodic and paralinguistic voice resources contribute to the accomplishment of these tasks.
Notes
Published as: Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth (1999). Coherent voicing: On prosody in conversational reported speech. In: Wolfram Bublitz & Uta Lenk, eds., Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse: How to create it and how to describe it. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 11-32.
