Prosodic salience and the emergence of new decisions: On approving responses to proposals in Finnish workplace interaction  

Oleh:

Stevanovic, Melisa

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Pragmatics: An Interdiciplinary Journal of Language Studies vol. 44 no. 06 & 07 (2012), page 843–862.
Topik: Proposals; Decision-making; Prosody; Pitch contours; Emotion; Conversation analysis
Fulltext: Stevanovic_M.pdf (744.38KB)

Isi artikel

When participants in joint decision-making approve each other's proposals they typically make action declarations (‘‘yea, let's take it’’) and/or positive evaluations (‘‘yea, that's good’’). This paper focuses on the prosodic features of such ‘approval turns’. Drawing on videorecordings of Finnish workplace interactions, I consider the interactional import of three prosodic patterns. Approval turns that are delivered with a (1) dynamic prosody (increased loudness, excessive pitch movement) establish new decisions, no matter whether the turns are action declarations or positive evaluations. In contrast, approval turns with a (2) flat prosody (decreased loudness, minimal pitch movement) do not—alone—suffice for new decisions to emerge. However, when speakers signal their approval with a (3) flat-stylized prosody (stylized figure, embedded in flat prosodic features), new decisions emerge just like with dynamic approval turns. I argue that the similarity of the sequential consequences of the dynamic and flat-stylized approval turns is related to the fact that in both cases the speakers display a clear emotional stance toward the matter at hand—even though the ‘‘valences’’ of these stances differ from each other. The paper seeks to elucidate the impact of prosodic events in joint decision-making, and the role of emotion as an interactional resource.

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali