Using cases of misalignment and realignment in the unfolding of interactional sequences in which future actions and events are being negotiated in everyday English conversation, this paper demonstrates that participants distinguish between the initiating actions of Proposal*, Offer*, Request*, and Suggestion*, if these labels are understood as technical terms for distinct constellations of answers to the questions (i) who will carry out the future action? and (ii) who will benefit from it?. The argument made is that these different action types are routinely associated with different sets of recurrent linguistic forms, orsocial action formats, and that it is through these that speakers can frame their turns as implementing one action type as opposed to another and that recipients can recognize these actions as such and respond to them accordingly. The fact that there is only a limited amount of ‘polysemy’, or overlap in the formats commonly used for Proposals*, Requests*, Offers*, and Suggestions* in English conversation, means that these formats deliver often distinctive cues to the type of action being implemented. When misalignments and realignments occur, they can often be traced to the fact that ‘polysemous’ linguistic formats have been used to implement the initiating action.

This paper investigates how speakers of English can use the prosodic design of utterances to identity parts of these utterances as instances of reported speech. We will show that prosodic changes can function like quotation marks in written texts by clearly delimiting left and right hand boundaries of the reported sequence. In the majority of cases, however, prosodic changes do not coincide with the boundaries of reported speech but occur nearby, functioning like a 'frame' for the interpretation of a sequence as reported or even only as a 'flag' attracting attention and inviting the listener to actively (re-)construct the corresponding boundaries. Our data analysis also provides evidence for the use of prosodic designs to typify a figure in different roles, which - due to their unique 'prosodic design' can be presented without any verbalized projection of upcoming reported speech, once they have been introduced. This is due to the 'referent-tracking' nature of some prosodic designs of reported utterances.

No abstract

This chapter investigates the linguistic resources deployed by recipients of conversational complaint stories to show affiliation (or not) with the teller, affiliation being understood as the display of support and endorsement for a conveyed affective stance, here typically anger and/or indignation. Among the verbal means for affiliative reception are claims of understanding, congruent negative assessments and by-proxy justifications, while factual follow-up questions, minimal responses and withholdings are shown to be non-affiliative. As a rule, affiliative verbal devices are accompanied by prosodic matching or upgrading, while non-affiliative ones have prosodic downgrading. The affiliative import of response cries is shown to depend even more heavily on prosodic matching or upgrading, although the transitoriness of prosody makes verbal reinforcement a desideratum. All in all, the discussion paints a complex picture of what it takes to come across as affiliative in response to a conversational complaint story, but one not lacking in systematicity. 1. On story reception in conversation 1.1 Affiliation vs. alignment In a recent contribution to the literature on conversational storytelling, Stivers (2008) distinguishes two types of story reception: alignment and affiliation. Alignment involves supporting the asymmetric distribution of roles which characterizes the storytelling activity: e.g., positioning oneself as story recipient and refraining from 2 coming in while the telling is in progress. Mis-aligning involves, e.g., competing for the floor during the telling or failing to treat a story as in progress or, on its completion, as over. Alignment is thus a structural dimension of the activity of story reception. It can be achieved among other things through the use of vocal continuers (mm hm, uh huh and yeah) during story production. Affiliation, on the other hand, is a social dimension in story reception. Stivers describes it as "the hearer displays support of and endorses the teller"s conveyed stance" (2008: 35), stance being understood as "the teller"s affective treatment of the events he or she is describing" (2008: 37). How do storytellers convey stance? For one, story prefaces (e.g., something very very cute happened last night or I'm broiling about something) inform recipients about the sort of response which the teller is seeking on story completion (Sacks 1974). But stance can also be conveyed through prosody, e.g., in reported speech (Couper-Kuhlen 1999, Günthner 1999), and through various forms of embodiment (Niemelä 2010, Goodwin et al this volume). Furthermore, the (sequential) context of the telling can offer clues; for instance, in a medical visit a telling is likely to be conveying a trouble or problem (Stivers 2008). It is through resources such as these that story recipients are provided with access to the teller"s stance. Affiliation is generally agreed to be the preferred response in storytelling. Stivers argues that it is achieved by "the provision of a stance toward the telling that mirrors...

No abstract

No abstract

This article draws on work at the interface of grammar and interaction to argue that the clause is a locus of interaction, in the sense that it is one of the most frequent grammatical formats which speakers orient to in projecting what actions are being done by others' utterances and in acting on these projections. Yet the way in which the clause affords grammatical projectability varies significantly from language to language. In fact, it depends on the nature of the clausal grammatical formats which are available as resources in a language: in some languages these allow early projection in the turn unit (as in English), in others they do not (as in Japanese). We focus here on these two languages and show that their variable grammatical projectability has repercussions on the way in which three interactional phenomena – next-turn onset, co-construction, and turn-unit extension – are realized in the respective speech communities. In each case the practices used are precisely the ones which the clausal grammatical formats in the given language promote. The evidence thus suggests that clauses are interactionally warranted, if variably built, formats for social action.

Recent years have seen extensive discussion of clause combining in synchronic and diachronic perspective (Haiman & Thompson 1988; Traugott & Konig l99l;Hopper & Traugott 1993). The thrust of much of this researchimplicit in the term 'clause combining' itselfhas been to cast doubt upon the traditional dichotomy of coordination vs. subordination (Irhmann 1988; also Haiman & Thompson 1984). New models have been proposed for describing text-semantic, or rhetorical, links between clauses at the level of discourse rather than at the level of sentence (Mann 1984;Matthiessen & Thompson 1988; Mann 1992). And empirical studies have begun to appear showing what lexical and grammatical resources real speakers and writers rely on for particular kinds of clause linkage in spoken and written discourse (for causal linkage, see e.g. Altenberg 1984Altenberg , 1987Ford 1993Ford , 1994. Yet with only one or two notable exceptions, the intonation of clause combining has not figured centrally in these investigations.The present study, aligned in the empirical tradition, sets out to examine specifically how English speakers deploy pitch, loudness and timing in the configuration of lexically marked causal clause combining in discourse.l The study is based on close analysis of the use of becawe as a clause connector in approximately four hours of British and American spoken discourse, including face-to-face family chat, radio phone-in programs and televised public debate. Approximately 200 tokens of because underwent auditory and instrumental phonetic analysis in the course of the study. It will be argued that there is evidence for two distinct intonational patterns associated with causal clause combining in English. These patterns are found in different sequential environments and can be shown to have different sequential implications for subsequent talk. Moreover, they appear to be used prototypically for trvo different types of semantic causality and can thus be said to contribute to the constitution of distinct constructional schemas for causal linkage. However, the two constructions differ in terms of markedness. This markedness relation togetherwith a preference for'degrammaticizing'constructional schemas for causal clause combining in conversation conspire to favor only one of the intonational and sequential patterns vith becarue, thus accounting for its prevalence in the data corpus.1 I am grateful to Peter Auer, Susanne Gtinthner and Harrie Mazeland as well as to the editon of this special issue for helpful comments on this paper.