Of "an"s 'n' "and"s – observations on the prosodic-phonetic make-up of a coordinator in talk-in-interaction
| Panel: | P73 - Phonetics of Talk-in-Interaction: New Frontiers |
| Author: | Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar |
| Abstract: | |
| In grammar-books, the functions of "and" as phrasal coordinator and clausal conjunction are treated as standard knowledge (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985, Biber et al. 1999). In addition, studies on the uses of "and" in everyday conversation have described its discourse-organizational functions on a more global level (Schiffrin 1987, Mazeland/Huiskes 2001, Local 2004, Turk 2004, also Heritage/Sorjonen 1994 in institutional discourse). Yet, so far few studies have dealt with the phonological features of "and" in its functional environments systematically (but cf. Local 2004 on "and-uh(m)"). This contribution presents a survey of selected kinds of "and" in a larger corpus of private American-English telephone conversations. It pays particular attention to their prosodic and phonetic make-up, and it will point out correlations between the realization of "and", its position at prosodic unit boundaries and its specific interactional function. This contribution will show that not only and-uh(m) but also /æn/, /en/ and its realization with schwa have specific uses in talk-in-interaction. The findings presented are based on conversation-analytic and interactional-linguistic methodology, which includes quantitative analyses. |
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