Prosody Features of Collaborative Construction in Mandarin Conversation

Prosody Features of Collaborative Construction in Mandarin Conversation GUAN Yue The Hong Kong Polytechnic University – Peking University Research Centre on Chinese Linguistics, Beijing guanyue92@sina.com Abstract This paper examines the projection of prosody and syntactic structure in conversation, while trying to find out which side is more powerful when there is a conflict between prosodic expression and syntactic structures. The central task of this paper is to look at the phonetic performance of the collaborative construction from the general indicators of prosodic features: duration (length), loudness (intensity) and frequency (pitch). It compares phonetic parameters of the collaborative construction with the adjacent turns and describes it in detail. 1 Introduction In everyday face-to-face conversation, language forms are always accompanied by prosodic features of speech. In this paper, the author examines the basic prosody phenomenon in collaborative construction. In daily conversation, a syntactically complete sentence can be co- constructed by different speakers in adjacent turns, which is referred to as collaborative construction (CC)1 in this paper. The utterance produced by interactional participants 1 Here is an example quoted from Lerner (1987:16): David: so if one person said he couldn't invest (.) can project the remaining part of a sentence-in-progress, which is the basis of syntactic cooperation. It has been sufficiently observed that speakers can express their stance and emotion prosodically (Benjamin and Walker 2013); in fact, prosody also plays a very crucial role in turn-taking and turn organization. For example, Walker (2010) examines the mechanism of rush-through in English as a phonetic design of turn-holding and points out that the articulation rate of the final foot at the end of a TCU (Turn Constructional Unit) roughly doubles as that of the preceding one. Local (2005) discusses some prosodic features of collaborative completion when speakers and listeners are undertaking interactional tasks in everyday talk. These studies focus on how prosodic features can be recognized by listeners as a projection of a possible position of turn-taking (Goodwin 1986; Ford 1993, 2004; Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 1996; Walker 2013). 2 Background This paper takes an Interactional Linguistic perspective and adopts methodology of Conversation Analysis. Interactional Linguistics emphasizes on studying language in its home environment, manifested as conversations in everyday life. Conversations are “cooperatively achieved Kerry: then I'd have ta wait The two speakers co-produced one sentence. objects”, which “need to be adaptable to the emerging and ever-changing trajectory of interaction” (Couper-Kuhlen and Selting 2018). In a conversation, “overwhelmingly, people talk in turns” (Sacks et al. 1974). In Conversation Analysis, turn-constructional units (TCUs) are the basic units of conversation that compose turns. TCUs are addressed to their speakers, make relevant the next action and select the next speaker (Lerner 2004). This phenomenon is prevalent in the “compound turn- constructional unit format” (Lerner 1991). Such format may be built with two clauses and sometimes delivered in two separate prosodic units, but is oriented to by participants as one single turn-constructional format (Lerner 1991, 1996). Some researchers have attempted to account for other issues in cross-linguistic perspective based on …

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