Negotiating topic changes:native and non-native English speakers in conversation

There is a tendency to view conversations involving non‐native speakers (NNSs) as inevitably fraught with problems, including an inability to handle topic management. This article, in contrast, will focus on effective topic changes made by non‐native speakers during informal conversations with native speakers of English. A micro‐analysis of ten conversations revealed several ways of shifting conversational topics; however, the article concentrates on those strategies which the participants used to effect a particular type of topic move, namely ‘marked topic changes’, where there is no connection at all with previous talk. The findings show how these topic changes were jointly negotiated, and that the non‐native speakers’ contributions to initiating new topics were competently managed

The pragmatics of discourse anaphora in English Evidence from conversational repair

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The prosody of information units in spontaneous monologue

This article describes a perceptual evaluation of the prosodic structure of a spontaneously produced monologue. It was found that the speaker studied demarcates larger-scale topical units in spoken discourse by means of intonation (use of melodic boundary markers, scaling of maxima in pitch’ movements, general decline in average pitch) and by the use of pauses with variable durations. In a perception test, it was examined to what extent these prosodic devices may be important to listeners. Subjects were confronted with three unintelligible (band-pass-filtered) versions of a fragment of the elicited monologue: (1) with the original prosody unchanged; (2) with constant pause duration and the original speech melody; (3) with monotonous pitch and the original pause structure. They were instructed to indicate the boundaries of the larger-scale topical units in the three versions. Subjects were able to detect correctly the major discourse boundaries in all three filtered versions in a significant number of cases. They performed best when confronted with version 1. Versions 1 and 2, in their turn, did better than version 3, which suggests that, in the performance of this speaker, into nation is a perceptually more important factor than pause for the clarification of the topical make-up of a text, though the latter dimension is certainly not negligible

Prodosic cues to discourse boundaries in experimental dialogues

In a dialogue, there are at least two sorts of boundaries between discourse units. One type of boundary signals the end of a topical unit; another type of boundary the end of a turn at talk. These two do not necessarily coincide, as a speaker may wish to a new topical unit without wanting to be interrupted by his interlocutor. In order to test whether prosodic cues can differentiate unambigously between topic and turn boundaries, a series of production experiments was set up in which topic-finality and turn-finality were varied independently, and in which visual and non-prosodic verbal cues could not be used. In the most complex condition, the speaker had to give clear cues for topic finality, while not prematurely losing the floor. In this condition, speakers avoided using low tones at turn-internal topical boundaries, reserving them to signal turn-final topic boundaries. When listeners were confronted with portions of the description taken out of their contexts, they could reliably differentiate between turn-final and non-turn-final topical units. Interestingly, when the final parts of a topical unit were removed, listeners could still discriminated between turn-final and non-turn-final expressions, apparently basing themselves on other, more global, prosodic cues. This holds similarly for both minimally and maximally incomplete units

Prosody as a marker of information flow in spoken discourse

This study concerns the role of prosody in the structuring of information in monologue discourse, from the point of view of production as well as perception. Two prosodic variables were investigated: speech melody and pauses. Melodically, it was found that local intonation features (falling vs. rising tones) are employed to indicate discourse boundaries. On a more global level, speakers appear to use relative height of pitch peaks and of average pitch values as markers of information units. Furthermore, speakers manipulate both the distribution of pauses and their relative length to mark information flow. A perception experiment was carried out to evaluate the perceptual impact of both speech melody and pauses. It was found that, in the absence of semantic cues, both melodic and pausal information is used by listeners to process the incoming signal in terms of discourse structure