Reflections on Studying Prosody in Talk-in-Interaction

Rather than focusing on conversation as one context among many in which to study prosody, this paper approaches prosody as one set of resources and practices among many by which participants interactively produce conversation and other talk-in-interaction. Three episodes of conversation are examined, each exemplifying a different order of organization in which prosodic practices may be implicated. The first develops various lines of evidence to show that pitch peaks may be deployed and understood as projecting that a next syntactic possible completion is the designed end of the turn. In the second, the initial turns in the opening of a telephone conversation are examined as the site in which the participants work out the pitch level at which the conversation--or at least its first part--will be conducted, and thereby "negotiate" the tenor of the conversation's launching. The third episode focuses on the central part which prosody can play in the constitution of the action which an utterance is implementing. The paper closes with some reflections on what is needed for students of conversation in dealing with prosody--focusing especially on the need for a relevant way of describing the mediating operations which take the prosody as (partial) input and yield the action (or other conversational feature) being accomplished as outcome.