Form ≠ Function: The Independence of Prosody and Action

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Gareth Walker for advice on the organization of this article, and to Charles Antaki for editorial guidance.

Notes

¹A clause is, put simply, a subject and a predicate, where a predicate means a verb and everything else having to do with that verb, including a direct object, prepositional phrases, adverbs, and so on.

²I have retained Thompson and Mann's (1987, p. 437) division into (numerical) units, defined thus: “each unit consists of one clause, except that embedded complement and relative clauses are considered part of the same unit as the clauses with which they are associated.”

³I in no way mean to single out these particular authors as the source or root of the problem; theirs is but one out of many uses of the terminology that I wish to argue against!

⁴The transcription system GAT2 for English (Selting et al., 2011) addresses many of these concerns.

⁵A phonetic feature not usually captured in any conventional CA transcription system.