Prosody and Particles: A Study of Interaction in a Malaysian Academic Meeting

Zuraidah Mohd Don, Shu Sim Tam

Abstract


This article examines prosody in interaction in the context of a 66 minute meeting to agree on assessment marks as part of a pilot project studying assessment procedures. The data is drawn from a larger set of data of approximately 10 hours of academic meetings. The three participants are female colleagues involved in English Language teaching. The raw data in the audio file was subjected to a three stage process of annotation, analysis and presentation. Findings show that particles can be sorted into emotive particles, artefacts of vocalisation, and those concerned with the sharing of knowledge between speaker and addressee. They can also be classified according to their relationship to speech, and whether or not they are linguistically and phonologically organised. What is also interesting is that when prosody co-occurs with particles it operates in a different way than when it illustrates syntactic or information structure or plays a role in turn taking. Prosody appears to operate as an independent component of particles, using salience to draw attention, or lack of salience to accompany activities which are not intended as interruptions.

 

Keywords: prosody; academic meeting; particles; English language; interaction


DOI:http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2203-02


Full Text:

PDF

References


Aijmer, K. & Simon-Vandenbergen, A.-M. (2003). The discourse particle well and its equivalents in Swedish and Dutch. Linguistics. Vol. 41, 1123-1161.

Armstrong, L. E. & Ward, I. C. (1926). A Handbook of English Intonation. Cambridge: Heffer.

Arundale, R. B. (2010). Constituting face in conversation: face, facework and interactional achievement. Journal of Pragmatics. Vol. 42, 2078-2105.

Barth-Weingarten, D., Dehé, N. & Wichmann A. (2009). Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics (pp. 107-128). Bingley, UK.: Emerlad Group Publishing

Baxter, L. A. & Montgomery, B. M. (1996). Relating: Dialogues and Dialectics. New York: Guilford Press.

Beach, W. A. (1993). Transitional regularities for 'casual' "Okay" usages. Journal of Pragmatics, 19, 325-352.

Bolinger, D. (1972). Accent is predictable (if you're a mindreader). Language. Vol. 48, 633-644.

Bolinger, D. (1986). Intonation and its Parts: Melody in Spoken English. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bolinger, D. (1989). Intonation and its Uses: Melody in Grammar and Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.

Chen, H.C. & Wang, Q. (2016). The effects of Chinese learners' English acoustic-prosodic patterns on listeners' attitudinal judgement. 3L: The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies. Vol. 22(2), 91–

Chomsky, N. & Halle, M. (1968). Sound Patterns of English.

Cruttenden, A. (1986). Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Crystal, D. (1969). Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Enfield, N. J., Dingemanse, M., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Brown, P., Dirksmeyer, T.& Torreira, F. (2013). Huh? What? - a first survey in twenty-one languages. In M. Hayashi, G. Raymond & J. Sidnell (Eds.), Conversation Repair and Understanding (pp. 343-380). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Falk, D. (2000). Hominid brain evolution and the origins of music. In N. L. Wallin, B. Merker & S. Brown (Eds.), The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Fraser, B. (1999). What are discoure markers? Journal of Pragmatics. Vol. 31, 931-952

Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.

Guthrie, A. M. (1997). On the systematic deployment of okay and mmhmm in academic advising sessions. Pragmatics. Vol. 7(3), 397-415.

Heritage, J. (1984). A change-of-state token and aspects of its sequential placement. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp. 299-345). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heritage, J. (1998). Oh-prefaced responses to inquiry. Language in Society. Vol. 27, 291-334.

Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in action: action formation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction. Vol. 45(1), 1-29.

Heritage, J. (2013). Epistemics in conversation. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 370-394). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Heritage, J. & Clayman, S. (2010). Talk in Action. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an Introduction. In G. H. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation (pp. 13-23). Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Kingdon, R. (1958). The Groundwork of English Intonation. London: Longman.

Knowles, G. (1975). Scouse: The urban dialect of Liverpool. (PhD), University of Leeds, Leeds.

Knowles, G., Williams, B. & Taylor, L. (Eds.). (1996). A corpus of Formal British English Speech: The Lancaster / IBM Spoken English Corpus. London: Longman.

Lam, W.Y.P. (2009). What a difference prosody provides: The role of prosody in the study of discourse particles. In D. Barth-Weingarten, N.

Dehé, & A. Wichmann (2009). Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics (pp. 107-128). Bingley, UK.: Emerlad Group Publishing.

Liberman, A. (1996). Speech: A Special Code. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Local, J. (1996). Conversational phonetics: some aspects of news receipts in everyday talk. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & M. Selting (Eds.), Prosody in Conversation (pp. 177-230). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Monetta, L., Cheang, H. S &, Pell, M. D. (2013). Understanding speaker attitudes from prosody by adults with Parkinson's disease. Journal of Neuropsychology. Vol. 2(2), 415-30.

O'Connor, J. D. & Arnold, G. F. (1973). Intonation of Colloquial English. London: Longman.

Pierrehumbert, J. B. (1980). The Phonology and Phonetics of English Intonation. (PhD), MIT.

Pike, K. L. (1945). The Intonation of American English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Premack, D. & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Vol. 1, 515-526.

Reed, B. S. (2011). Analysing Conversation: An Introduction to Prosody. London: Palgrave.

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. & Jefferson, G. (1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language. Vol. 50, 696-735.

Schank, R. & Abelson, R. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structure. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steele, J. (1775). The Melody and Measure of Speech. Menston: Scolar Press.

Ting, S-H., Mahanita Mahadhir & Chang, S-L. (2010). Grammtical errors in spoken English of university students in oral communication course. GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies. Vol. 10(10), 53-70.

Tomasello, M. (2010). Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wells, R. S. (1945). The pitch phonemes of English. Language. Vol. 21, 27-39.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Yngve, V. (1970). On getting a word in edgewise. Paper presented at the

Sixth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 567-577.

Zuraidah Mohd Don & Ahmad Izadi. (2011). Relational connection and separation in Iranian dissertation defences. Journal of Pragmatics. Vol. 43, 3782-3792.


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


 

 

 

eISSN : 2550-2247

ISSN : 0128-5157