Pitch and the Projection of More Talk

ABSTRACT

This study investigates prototypically “turn-final” pitch features (fall-to-low) at points of possible turn-completion where the same speaker continues. It is shown that points of possible turn-completion accompanied by fall-to-low and followed by same-speaker continuation only rarely engender incoming talk. It is shown that such points are frequently accompanied by nonpitch talk-projecting phonetic features and that the presence of these features may constrain the nature of any incoming talk. The results of the study should serve as caution to researchers with regard to an overemphasis on intonation when describing and analyzing talk-in-interaction. Data are from audio recordings of American English telephone calls.

Notes

¹ The number of decisions made (1,590) was estimated on the basis of the number of words in the transcriptions supplied with the Callhome corpus, stopping after the first word marked as the 20th point of possible turn-completion followed by same-speaker continuation by either researcher in each call.