John Local

Towards a phonology of conversation: turn-taking in Tyneside English

Remarkably little is known in detail about the phonetics and phonology of naturally occurring conversational talk. Virtually nothing of interest is known of the interactional implications of particular kinds of phonetic events in everyday talk: in particular about the ways in which participants in talk deploy general phonetic resources to accomplish specific interactional tasks. This is in part a consequence of the tendency of recent research on the phonological aspect of discourse to limit itself to ‘intonation’ as an area of primary interest. This work has moved away from the type of phonological analysis, such as that of Halliday (1967), that states intonational systems in terms of grammatically defined units or sentence types. Workers such as Brazil (1975, 1978, 1981), Brown, Currie and Kenworthy (1981), and Coulthard and Brazil (1981) have pursued Bolingers suggestion that the relationship between intonation and grammar is ‘casual not causal’ and have sought to relate ‘intonation’ to discourse categories rather than to grammatical ones. These, and similar attempts to deal with aspects of discourse phonology, have suggested some organizational features which traditional linguistic accounts have not dealt with. On the whole, however, these recent attempts have been less than satisfactory for one or more of the following reasons.

Turn-competitive incomings

Abstract A recurrent feature of multi-party conversation is that one speaker comes in prior to the completion of anothers turn and can be heard as directly competing with the other for possession of the turn. That is, the incomer can be heard as wanting the floor to himself not when the current speaker has finished but now, at this point in the conversation. Our analysis reveals that in managing talk of this kind participants, methodically produce and monitor for certain prosodic features of speech. These features, which have hitherto received scant attention in analyses of interaction, involve pitch-height, tempo and loudness variations. By deploying these prosodic features participants can constitute their incomings as competitive for the turn irrespective of the lexico-syntactic or illocutionary characteristics of their talk.

Phonology for conversation: Phonetic aspects of turn delimitation in London Jamaican

Abstract Participants in conversation have at their disposal many ways of showing that their speaking-turn is complete. An important resource for achieving this interactive task is provided by phonetic features. However, the precise role of these features has been obscured because analysts have relied too heavily on their intuitions, particularly about intonational meaning. Drawing on techniques developed within Conversation Analysis we give a precise formulation of the role of phonetic features in turn-delimitation in the speech of London Jamaicans. We show that turn-delimitation in London Jamaican may be signalled by features of pitch, loudness and rhythm centred on the last syllable of the turn. In this respect, London Jamaican is different from some other varieties of English.

The sense of an ending: a case of prosodic delay

Studies of normal and atypical prosodic development show that some children learning English invariably locate the main prosodic prominence at the end of the utterance, even though the main focus of information may come earlier. A case study is presented of David, a speech- and language-impaired child from the West Midlands of England who displayed this prosodic pattern at the age of 5, but not a year later. Since marked prosodic differences exist between the regional accent that he is exposed to and other varieties of English, Davids prosodic behaviour is compared to that of adults and children speaking the same West Midlands variety. The analysis draws on techniques developed within conversation analysis to explore the relationship between prosodic detail and interactional behaviour. It is argued that, in order to maintain conversational interaction, children such as David may be using their prosodic resources to delimit unambiguously the end of their turn at talk, and that this is at the expense of cl...

A Model of Timing for Nonsegmental Phonological Structure

Usually the problem of timing in speech synthesis is construed as the search for appropriate algorithms for altering durations of speech units under various conditions (e.g., stressed versus unstressed syllables, final versus non-final position, nature of surrounding segments). This chapter proposes a model of phonological representation and phonetic interpretation based on Firthian prosodic analysis [Fir57], which is instantiated in the YorkTalk speech generation system. In this model timing is treated as part of phonetic interpretation and not as an integral part of phonological representation. This leads us to explore the possibility that speech rhythm is the product of relationships between abstract constituents of linguistic structure of which there is no single optimal distinguished unit.

Temporal constraints and characterising syllable structuring

Introduction: temporal constraint and the syllable One of the most robust aspects of syntagmatic phonological patterning across languages is a strong tendency for consonants and vowels to collate with one another into structures of the size of a syllable. At the same time, an explicit and simple characterisation of the phonetics of syllables has yet to be found, leading many researchers to the conclusion that no such characterisation will ever be found. Syllabic patterning could be the result of a convergence of several different phonetic factors which each have their roots in different aspects of the speech communication process. In this paper, I will show evidence which indicates that one phonetic aspect of syllabic organisation is a tendency for gestures which inhabit particular locations in a syllable to have particular preferred intergestural timings. The evidence comes from a rate-controlled repetition experiment involving simple coda and onset structures. The syllable has various uses in linguistic theory, many of which are reviewed in Blevins (1995). First, it acts as a foundational unit in prosodic organisation. Thus, it figures in the construction of prosodic trees and in various operations in prosodic morphology. Also, minimal words often consist of a single syllable in many languages. Second, the syllable often serves as the domain within which segmental cooccurrence restrictions are expressed. A common traditional argument for the syllable is the existence of phonotactic constraints which are easily specified in terms of syllables or syllabic constituents.

On the intersection of phonetic detail and the organization of interaction: clinical connections.

Abstract The analysis of language use in real-world contexts poses particular methodological challenges. We codify responses to these challenges as a series of methodological imperatives. To demonstrate the relevance of these imperatives to clinical investigation, we present analyses of single episodes of interaction where one participant has a speech and/or language impairment: atypical prosody, echolalia and dysarthria. We demonstrate there is considerable heuristic and analytic value in taking this approach to analysing the organization of interaction involving individuals with a speech and/or language impairment.