Managing Problems of Acceptability Through High Rise-Fall Repetitions

Abstract

This article examines one of the ways in which matters of truth, appropriateness, and acceptability are raised and managed within the course of everyday conversation. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, we show that by repeating what another participant has said and doing so with a high rise-fall intonation contour, a speaker claims that the repeated talk is “wrong” and in need of correction. There is an incongruity between two versions of the world—the one presented in the repeated speaker's talk and the one the repeating speaker knows or believes to be true, appropriate, or acceptable. The ensuing sequences are routinely expanded and morally charged as the participants jostle for epistemic or moral authority over the matter at hand and work to repair the incongruity (even if, in the end, they agree to disagree).

Acknowledgments

We thank Harrie Mazeland, Betty Couper-Kuhlen, Jeff Robinson, Paul Drew, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article.

Notes

¹ We mean “immediately” not in the temporal sense but in the turn-sequential sense. That is, as the next unit of talk (see Benjamin, 2012; Schegloff, 2000). Speakers in fact quite often withhold their HRF repetitions slightly, most likely to create further opportunities for the speaker of the troublesome talk to self-initiate repair (Schegloff, 2000; Schegloff et al., 1977).

² Most are casual conversations (both on the phone and face-to-face), though some are institutional interactions (e.g., work-related talk among bankers, politicians, and veterinarians). The participants involved vary considerably in their socioeconomic background, age, and language variety (e.g., many dialects of American and British English are included). Although we make no attempt to document the constancy or variation of HRF repetitions across different social contexts, settings, or groups, the range of data suggests this practice is quite generic.

³ Semitones (ST) provide a perceptually more appropriate representation of pitch than Hertz (see Couper-Kuhlen, 1996; Nolan, 2003): 12ST = 1 octave.

⁴ However, the turn subsequent to the HRF repetition did, in many cases, exhibit some elements of prosodic matching (i.e., similar intonation contour and placement in the speaker's range), but an investigation of that turn is beyond the scope of this article.

⁵ One reviewer has questioned how high the pitch peak needed to be to warrant inclusion in our collection; we cannot give a numerical answer to this but instead relied on our systematic impressionistic transcriptions of the data. The contour needed to be recognizable as “the same” as other contours produced by other speakers using different lexical items while simultaneously fulfilling all the other sequential-interactional criteria. Given the multiplicity of functions that pitch/intonation is used to manage in natural interaction, we cannot isolate a cut-off point below or above which a contour could/could not “count” as HRF. Additionally, it should be noted that we are not claiming that HRF pitch contours are the sole means available for pointing out an incongruity in the prior talk. See below for further discussion of the discriminability of the practice we are describing.

⁶ The findings reported here are not primarily comparative; that is, we include examples of other sorts of repetitions only to support our claim that the HRF repetitions are being used to perform a particular, differentiated function. In Walker & Benjamin, 2013, we present the results of a comparison of the various phonetic realizations of other-repetitions used to initiate repair.

⁷ Our argument is not circular. The only functional (action-sequential) requirement was that the utterance initiated repair of some kind. That HRF repetitions “turned out” to only manage problems of acceptance (and not hearing and/or understanding) is indeed a finding.

⁸ In one case in our collection, the sequence continues for over 4 minutes. Despite a number of attempts by both participants, it is only successfully closed—though the incongruity still unresolved—when a third participant (speaker C) complains off phone from the background about their “arguing” (see below). This rather dramatic case illustrates both the capacity of HRF repetitions and the claim they embody, to derail talk, and the extent to which participants will work to defend their versions of the world (see Conclusion).

[CallHome-5888]

	1 B: what's he talking about
	2 (0.3)
	3 A: uh- (.) oh he's getting tired of me arguing about football
	4 [he's
	5 [@:: @ [@ @
	6 A:    [he hasn't had any [sleep for    ]
	7 C: [xx  xx  (about)] football and you're
	8 arguing about your (0.6) your imaginary game
	9 (0.6)
	10 A: anyway =
	11 B: = @ @ @ .hhhh whatever
	12 C: [come on
	13 B: [.hhhhhh anyway hhh we'll be coming home in uh… [[new topic]]

⁹ This extract, as well as a few other cases in our collection, has a final rise rather than the more common final fall. However, we can find no difference between the few HRF+rise cases and the HRF+no rise. Therefore, we conclude that the HRF is the most salient aspect of the repetition, with the final pitch movement dealing with other, possibly unrelated, issues.

¹⁰ We see no reason that the HRF contour could not be doing the function we claim—initiating repair on an incongruity—and simultaneously marking narrow focus. See the previous discussion of contrast and focus.

¹¹ Unfortunately, what she means by this is rather opaque, at least to outsiders like us. Relevant, however, is that both participants are Hispanic-American and throughout this conversation have strongly oriented to their Latin backgrounds, for instance, by contrasting or in other ways distancing themselves from “Americans.”

¹² Schegloff (1997) and Bolden (2009) document similar cases of “repeat+talk” turns in English and Russian, respectively. Bolden's collection of repetitions with and without subsequent talk by B contrasts clearly in terms of action. The former deal “with issues of intersubjectivity or understanding while repeat prefacing is reserved for problematizing actions (that are quite clearly understood)” (p. 140). In contrast, in our collection of HRF repetitions, we do not see any difference across the two subsets. All serve, in Bolden's words, to “problematize” actions that are clearly understood.

¹³ For conversation analytic work on English, see Jefferson (1972), Schegloff et al. (1977), Kelly and Local (1989), Sacks (1992), Schegloff (1997), Drew (2003), Wilkinson and Kitzinger (2006), Sidnell (2010), Robinson and Kevoe-Feldman (2010), and Robinson (2006, 2009, in press). For conversation analytic work on a variety of other languages, see Sorjonen (1996), Selting (1996), Kim (1999), Wu (2006), Svennevig (2008), Englert (2008), and Bolden (2009). Within linguistics, there is a substantial, and in some cases overlapping, body of literature exploring the design and use of echo questions. See, for example, Bolinger (1957), Halliday and Hasan (1976), and Iwata (2003). To the best of our knowledge, the present article is the first to tie repetitions with this phonetic design (HRF) to this type of trouble (acceptance). The closest is a suggestion by Robinson and Kevoe-Feldman (2010). In their analysis of repair-initiating other-repetitions of entire actions, they observe that in contrast to final rising pitch, final falling pitch seems to delimit the nature of the trouble to problems of acceptance (p. 236). Although this certainly aligns with our work in some ways, our repetitions involve a more complex pitch movement and are both partial and full.

¹⁴ This example highlights the difficulty of rendering the relevant sounds of an interaction in readable English orthography. Both speakers produce [si:] for the letter “C”. Although the subsequently proffered candidate name, Kubrick, is spelled with a “K”, there is no orientation by either participant to this being an incorrect or improbable guess, even though the orthographic transcription may bias readers toward that interpretation.

¹⁵ Experienced readers of waveforms will notice that “Geoffrey” is, of course, a pseudonym.

¹⁶ Cruttenden's assertion that one (local) meaning of the rise-fall contour is “challenging” fits nicely alongside our analysis, but the fact remains that we disagree with the practice of assigning meaning to pitch (or any phonetic parameter) outside of the actual context of use.