Greeting: Displaying Stance Through Prosodic Recipient Design

Abstract

This article examines the social action of greeting in naturally occurring face-to-face interaction, paying special attention to how people prosodically produce their very first vocalized utterances. Close analysis of a corpus of 337 video recorded openings shows that participants recipient design greetings on the level of prosody, tailoring them to each addressee and thus hearably displaying a stance toward the current state and character of their social relationship. Documenting the discovery of a prosodic continuum along which parties fine-tune their greetings, this article elucidates two distinct clusters of prosodic features with which participants recurrently design their greetings. Analysis demonstrates that parties use each prosodic cluster to display a different stance toward encountering the addressed recipient, with prosodically “large” greetings displaying a positive stance of approval and prosodically “small” greetings displaying (no more than) a neutral stance.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Emily Elfner for hours of helpful discussion about the technical aspects of this research, and I thank John McCarthy, Mary Clark, Manny Schegloff, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen for generously sharing their wisdom. I also thank the ROLSI reviewers for their thoughtful, detailed comments. Portions of this article were presented at the 2010 International Conference on Conversation Analysis, Mannheim, Germany. I thank the University of New Hampshire Center for Humanities for support.

Notes

¹To indicate the type of intonation movement at the end of each TCU, I use the following notation: rise-to-high [?], rise-to-mid [,], level pitch [-], fall-to-mid [;], and fall-to-low [.]. Data in this article also use the British pound sign [£] to indicate smile voice, and an asterisk [*] to indicate onset of visible conduct described inside double parentheses [(())].

²This finding contradicts Sacks's (1975, pp. 68–69) claim that “greetings are not repeatably used,” unless Sacks is suggesting only that greetings should not occur directly upon completion of a prior sequence of them.

³Owen's initial and subsequent greetings of Paula are also lexically identical (Hi in Excerpt 3, line 3, and Excerpt 4, line 3) but prosodically distinctive from one another in all of the ways described for Paula. Paula and Owen's greetings thus exhibit striking prosodic similarities and may be analyzable as instances of “prosodic matching,” even though they are virtually simultaneous and not apparently matched as the result of one person “copying” the previous speaker's prosodic pattern (Szczepek Reed, 2006, p. 35).

⁴The descriptions small and large are designed to specifically avoid imposing unwarranted labels on the data. While other terms exist in the literature for this kind of prosodic clustering (e.g., “phonetically downgraded” and “upgraded,” Ogden, 2006), these terms occasion deep analytic and methodological problems when used to analyze the design of first actions—the analytic target of this article.

⁵More recently, Dunbar (2004) suggests that we tend to greet distant acquaintances more effusively than we do those whom we see more often, thereby further bolstering the relationship due to longer time-since-last-contact.

⁶Within the “small” cluster of prosodic features, a phrase-final fall-to-low helps prosodically project the relevance of stopping to explicitly deal with identification as a discrete interactional activity. This contrasts with the fall-to-mid characteristic of the “large” cluster, which projects immediate movement onto next nonidentification sequences.

⁷For additional exemplars and analysis of locally subsequent greetings, see Pillet-Shore (2008, pp. 150–161).

⁸This analysis sheds additional light on Excerpt 2: Paula and Derik display that they are having trouble recognizing each other through the way they each prosodically produce their greetings at lines 2–3. Through Paula's use of high onset pitch and overall high pitch setting (see Figure 2), however, she does “displaying a positive stance” toward encountering the addressed-recipient—part of doing “being a welcoming host” even to an arriver with whom she is less familiar. In this excerpt, Paula is also the first to display remembering having previously met Derik (lines 10–11), with Derik lagging in his claimed recall of meeting her, which helps explain why he produces his greeting with level pitch.