Wells1998

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Wells1998
BibType ARTICLE
Key Wells1998
Author(s) Bill Wells, Sarah Macfarlane
Title Prosody as an interactional resource: turn-projection and overlap
Editor(s)
Tag(s) EMCA, IL, intonation, overlap, prosody, turn-taking, West Midlands dialect
Publisher
Year 1998
Language
City
Month
Journal Language and Speech
Volume 41
Number 3-4
Pages 265–294
URL Link
DOI 10.1177/002383099804100403
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

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Abstract

One aim of current research into talk-in-interaction is to identify the resources that enable recipients to monitor the course of a turn in progress in order to project its upcoming completion. This issue is addressed through analysis of instances of overlapping talk, focusing on their design—that is, their particular prosodic and other linguistic characteristics; their placement—in other words, where precisely they occur in relation to the turn being overlapped; and the subsequent behavior of the coparticipants. Phonetic analysis is combined with interactional techniques developed within Conversation Analysis, to warrant the relevance of categories by reference to the behavior of the participants themselves. As French and Local (1983) found, for an incoming to be treated as turn-competitive, it has to be designed with relatively high pitch and loud volume. These turn-competitive incomings are positioned within the turn in progress, and before the final major accent. By contrast, overlapping incomings positioned after the major accent are not designed as or treated as turn-competitive. On the basis of this analysis, we can define transition relevance place (TRP) as the space between the TRP-projecting accent of the current turn and the onset of the next turn. TRP-projecting accents are identifiable on independent grounds, being phonetically distinct from non-TRP-projecting accents. They thus provide a robust resource for participants to monitor the upcoming completion of the turn.

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