Lucy Pickering

CURRENT RESEARCH ON INTELLIGIBILITY IN ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA

Recognition of incipient change in the status of English as an international language has yielded a small but growing area of research addressing nonnative speaker to nonnative speaker (NNS-NNS) interaction. Issues concerning intelligibility are a key focus of this investigation, particularly as native speaker models have limited relevance to these new contexts of use. This review highlights current research from diverse areas of applied linguistics that have addressed aspects of intelligibility in both experimental and real-world settings. Current findings suggest that the processes by which understanding is achieved in English as a lingua franca (ELF) interaction are qualitatively different from those observed in native speaker (NS)–based interaction, and that this has implications for a number of research and practice areas. Following a definition of terms, the chapter surveys current research and considers its influence on current trends in English language teaching. Possible directions for further research are also considered.

Intonation as a pragmatic resource in ELF interaction

Abstract The investigation of pragmatic strategies in ELF interaction is a relatively new area of research. This paper examines intonation as a pragmatic resource in ELF interaction. There is considerable research pointing to the critical role played by intonational structure in NS-based discourse to establish a state of informational and social convergence (Brazil, The communicative value of intonation in English, Cambridge University Press, 1997; Chun, Discourse intonation in L2, John Benjamins, 2002; Hewings, International Review of Applied Linguistics 33: 251–65, 1995; Pickering, TESOL Quarterly 35: 233–255, 2001; Wennerstrom, Music in everyday speech, Oxford University Press, 2001). The question of whether similar practices can be identified in ELF interaction remains open. In this paper, I review current understanding of the role of intonational structure in NS-based interaction and then examine data from ELF interactions. Using a model of intonation in discourse (Brazil, The communicative value of intonation in English, Cambridge University Press, 1997) to interpret these data, I argue that both pitch movement (tone choice) and relative pitch level (key choice) contribute to intelligibility and interactional success in ELF interaction. Participants appear to orient to pitch cues both as a signal of a possible trouble source and as a means to indicate that negotiation or repair sequences have been accomplished successfully.

Prosodic Markers of Saliency in Humorous Narratives

Much of what we think we know about the performance of humor relies on our intuitions about prosody (e.g., “its all about timing”); however, this has never been empirically tested. Thus, the central question addressed in this article is whether speakers mark punch lines in jokes prosodically and, if so, how. To answer this question, this article unites both the recently emerged research agenda grounding spoken discourse analysis in the precision and verifiability of acoustic analysis and a research agenda within the field of discourse and humor focused on the “performance” of humorous narratives. This article presents an analysis of a relatively simple form: the joke or short humorous narrative. The starting point of this analysis is the folk theory of joke-telling. Through instrumental measurement of pitch, volume, and speech rate, this study shows that, contrary to the folk theory of joke-delivery, punch lines are not delivered significantly louder than the preceding text, but rather at a significantly lower pitch and slower speech rate than the text preceding the punch line. In addition, punch lines are often, but not necessarily, signaled by a laughing voice or a smiling voice and are not preceded by significant pauses. This article concludes that the folk theory of joke-delivery is largely refuted. This study further investigates whether the saliency of punch lines, which would predict higher volume and pitch, is less significant than their final position in the narrative, which, being associated with final position in a paratone, or spoken paragraph, predicts that they will demonstrate lower volume and pitch values. The conclusion is that final positioning trumps the saliency of the punch lines and accounts for the significantly lower pitch and lack of significantly higher volume in punch lines.

Linguistic characteristics of AAC discourse in the workplace

This study examines linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the discourse of individuals with communication impairments who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices in the workplace by comparing them to those of non-AAC users in similar job settings. A typical workweek (≈ 40 hours) per focal participant (four AAC; four non-AAC) was recorded and transcribed to create a specialized corpus of workplace discourse of approximately 464,000 words at the time of this analysis. A multidimensional analysis of co-occurrence patterns along functional linguistic dimensions, following Biber (1988, 1995) [Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], reveals differences in the macro discourse characteristics of AAC vis-a-vis non-AAC texts. Results indicate that AAC texts make use of more informational, non-narrative, and explicit textual features of discourse than their non-AAC counterparts. Implications to improve the capabilities of AAC devices to produce speech that matches baseline expectations of co-workers in the workplace are discussed.

Timing in the performance of jokes

Abstract The notion of timing in humor is often mentioned as a very significant issue, and yet very little has been written about it. The paper reviews the scant literature on the subject and narrows down the definition of timing as comprising pauses and speech rate. The discussions of timing in the literature see it either as a speeding up or slowing down of speech rate. Using data collected from twenty joke performances, we show that speakers do not significantly raise or lower their speech rate at and around the punch line. The other common assumption is that punch lines are preceded by pauses. Our data show no evidence supporting this claim nor do they show differences concerning these parameters in jokes that involved punch lines in reported speech and those that did not. Similarly, we found no differences between prepared and spontaneous jokes. Therefore, our data lead us to conclude that the theory of timing in joke performance is in serious need of further research.

Smiling synchronicity and gaze patterns in dyadic humorous conversations

Abstract This present article is part of a larger study on speaker-hearer allocation of attentional resources in face-to-face interactions. The goal of the paper is twofold: first, we present results concerning the degree of correlation, in computer-mediated conversation, between speaker’s timing and intensity of smiling when humor is either present or absent in the conversation. The results were obtained from the analysis of five dyadic interactions between English speakers that were video and audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed to establish a baseline of synchronicity of smiling among participants. From the study it emerged that conversational partners engaged in humorous conversations not only reciprocate each other’s smiling, but also match each other’s smiling intensity. Our data led to the identification of different smiling and non-smiling synchronic behaviors that point to the existence of a synchronous multimodal relationship between humorous events and smiling intensity for conversational partners. Second, in the last part of the paper, we argue for the need of a multimodal conversational corpus in humor studies and present the corpus that is being collected, annotated, and analyzed at Texas A&M University–Commerce. The corpus consists of humorous interactions among dyads of native speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese for which video, audio, and eye-tracking data have been recorded. As part of this section of the paper, we also present some preliminary results based on the analysis of one English conversation, and some exploratory analysis of Chinese data, that show that greater attention is paid to facial areas involved in smiling when humor is present. This study sheds light on the role of smiling as a discourse marker (Attardo, S., L. Pickering, F. Lomotey & S. Menjo. 2013. Multimodality in Conversational Humor. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 11(2). 400–414.), and therefore as a meaningful device in verbal communication.

Narrative and Informational Dimensions of AAC Discourse in the Workplace

This chapter is an application of a corpus-based, multidimensional approach to discourse analysis pioneered by Biber (Variation across speech and writing, 1988; Dimensions of register variation: A cross-linguistic perspective, 1995; University language: A corpus-based study of spoken and written registers, 2006) to examine linguistic co-occurrence patterns in the language of individuals with communication impairments who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices in the workplace. Specifically, we utilize the linguistic dimensions extracted by Friginal (Discourse Studies, 10:715–736, 2008; The language of outsourced call centers: A corpus-based study of cross-cultural communication, 2009) from oral, telephone-based interactions in a business setting. The AAC and Non-AAC Workplace Corpus (ANAWC) (Pickering and Bruce, The AAC and non-AAC workplace corpus (ANAWC). [Collection of electronic texts], 2009) used in this chapter comprises over 200 hours of spoken interaction (approximately 1 million words) involving 8 focal participants and more than 100 interlocutors in 7 different work locations. The linguistic patterns and trends within three dimensions from Friginal’s model are interpreted further to identify contributing factors and features characterizing AAC and non-AAC workplace interactions. Our results suggest that AAC discourse can be clearly differentiated from non-AAC discourse along textual and functional domains. AAC texts make use of more informational, non-narrative, and procedural textual features of discourse than their non-AAC counterparts.