Prosodic orientation in English conversation explores the prosodic design of talk-in-interaction. Beatrice Reed demonstrates how participants in conversation actively orient to elements of intonation and prosody such as pitch contour, pitch register, and loudness. She describes the characteristics of several types of such orientation and analyzes their interactional effects and environments of occurrence. Reed adopts an innovative approach combining detailed phonetic description with a focus on talk-in-interaction as the fundamental object of inquiry, and at the same time makes important contributions to work on the social and interactional significance of intonation and prosody.
“Prosodic orientation” refers to interactants’ use of prosodic resources to make interactionally significant displays of their awareness of the prosodic design of prior talk. Chapters 2 and 4 look at such forms of cross-turn orientation, describing prosodic matching, prosodic non-matching, prosodic complementation, and prosodic continuation. Prosodic matching entails similarity on some prosodic dimension across a pair of adjacent turns; speakers are shown producing pitch contours, loudness, and pitch register shifts nearly identical to those in prior turns. Matching often occurs in contexts of turn yielding and conversation closing. By contrast, non-matching, the cross-turn occurrence of markedly different prosodies, appears in different contexts, such as disagreement.
Also discussed in chapter 2 is complementation – the cross-turn continuation of prosodic contours, usually pitch. The examples chosen to illustrate this phenomenon were particularly helpful in understanding its significance. Somewhat akin to complementation is prosodic continuation (chapter 4), whereby participants mutually construct a single prosodic contour and syntactic utterance. This part of the study makes forays into the syntactic literature on utterance completion, and its discussion of the typology of completions and their contexts of occurrence is worth reading.
An equally stimulating discussion of so-called “stylized” prosodies takes place in chapter 3. Included among stylized prosodies are sing-song voice, “extreme” prosodic design (especially of duration, loudness or pitch movement), and the select repetition of lexical items with a particular prosodic contour. Often found in appreciation of an object or voicing in represented speech, stylization is shown to re-key the interaction, either as playful or as routine.
Generally speaking, the book is quite readable, with sensible transcription conventions and good use of pitch diagrams and waveforms. At times the density of examples and transcripts threatens to obscure the overarching argument, but helpful summaries round up each subsection. Against popular monologic approaches to the pragmatics of prosody and intonation, Prosodic orientation in English conversation makes a strong argument for bringing prosodic analysis above the level of the single utterance and the individual speaker. Reed makes a creative move in directly comparing prosodies across turns, showing that interactants’ prosodic design is sensitive not just to the interactional context in general, but to preceding prosodies in particular. Researchers interested in the interactional significance of prosody will surely benefit from this work.
