2006/09/13

Ogden, R. (2006). Phonetic and social action in agreements and disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics, 38, 1752–1775.

Presentation: Shelly
Summary: Chris

This paper explores how paralinguistic features interact with the phonetic factors in turn taking. The acoustic features presented in the assessment sequence of conversation are investigated by the methodology of Conversation Analysis and phonetic observation. Results show that phonetic resources make contribution to the meaning of assessment and that there are strong relations between the types of assessment and the phonetic design. The characteristics of the second assessment can be examined by two dimensions: (1) the degree of agreement (agreement or disagreement) and (2) the preference dimension (preferred turns or dispreferred turns).The acoustic properties in the second assessment is related to the preference dimension rather than the degree of agreement. The phonetic properties of second assessment are upgraded relative to the fist part in a preferred action which includes a minimized gap between utterances or an explicit agreement. However, the phonetic properties are downgraded in a dispreferred action which consists of delay, repair, a construction of agreement plus disagreement, or an implicit disagreement. “Agreement” and “disagreement” were not found to have unique phonetic properties associated with them.