Contingency and action: a comparison of two forms of requesting

In this article, we explore the syntactic forms speakers use when making requests. An initial investigation of ordinary telephone calls between family and friends and out-of-hours calls to the doctor showed a difference in the distribution of modal verbs (e.g., Can you …), and requests prefaced by I wonder if. Modals are most common in ordinary conversation, whereas I wonder if … is most frequent in requests made to the doctor. This distributional difference seemed to be supported by calls from private homes to service organizations in which speakers also formatted requests as I wonder if. Further investigation of these and other corpora suggests that this distributional pattern is related not so much with the sociolinguistic speech setting but rather with speakers' orientations to known or anticipated contingencies associated with their request. The request forms speakers select embody, or display, their understandings of the contingencies associated with the recipient's ability to grant the request

Repetition and the prosody-pragmatics interface

Repetition poses certain problems for pragmatics, as evidenced by Sperber and Wilson’s claim that ‘‘the effects of repetition on utterance interpretation are by no means constant’’. This is particularly apposite when we examine repetitions produced in naturally occurring talk. As part of an ongoing study of how phonetics relates to the dynamic evolution of meaning within the sequential organisation of talk-in-interaction, we present a detailed phonetic and pragmatic analysis of a particular kind of self- repetition. The practice of repetition we are concerned with exhibits a range of forms: ‘‘have another go tomorrow . . . have another go tomorrow’’, ‘‘it might do . . . it might do’’, ‘‘it’s a shame . . . it’s a shame’’. The approach we adopt emphasises the necessity of exploring participants’ displayed understandings of pragmatic inferences and attempts not to prejudge the relevance of phonetic (prosodic) parameters. The analysis reveals that speakers draw on a range of phonetic features, including tempo and loudness as well as pitch, in designing these repetitions. The pragmatic function of repetitions designed in this way is to close sequences of talk. Our findings raise a number of theoretical and methodological issues surrounding the prosody– pragmatics interface and participants’ understanding of naturally occurring discourse

Form ≠ Function: The independence of prosody and action

This article argues for the importance of describing form independently of function, especially for prosodic and phonetic forms. Form and function are often conflated by language-in-interaction researchers when they give descriptive labels to the sound of talk (e.g., “upgraded” pitch, “continuing” intonation), and that tempts researchers to see a given form as having a given function or practice—often one that is influenced by the descriptive label. I argue that we should discipline ourselves to keeping to a purely technical description of any form (practice); that will then make it possible unambiguously to show how that form contributes to a particular function (action), without presuming the relationship to be exclusive. Data are in American and British English

The Lakhota Definite Articles and Topic Marking

This paper presents evidence that the definite articles k?u and ki in Lakhota are more adequately described as topic discontinuity and default markers, respectively. Using Givon's referential distance measure (1983), I show that ki is the default article, used when topic/participant continuity must be preserved. In the narrative studied here, the average referential distance for ki marked nouns was much shorter than that for k?u marked nouns, showing that k?u marks a shift to a previously established topic/participant. I show that we must take all aspects of discourse continuity into account when assessing the topicality of any character: the overall theme, the main action in the discourse at that point, and the agency of the participants