Prosody and pragmatic function in next-turn repetitions across five languages

This projects examines the role of prosody — generally understood as the acoustic-auditory post-lexical features of speech — in distinguishing the pragmatic function of next-turn repetitions in conversation across five languages: English, Finnish, French, Italian, and Finland Swedish. Next-turn repetitions are a recurrent conversational phenomenon that involves the lexical repetition of all or part of a speaker’s turn by another speaker in the next turn. The repetitions in focus are ones that problematise the repeated material and solicit a response by the original speaker, which often involves repairing a conversational problem. Previous research has shown that such repetitions can accomplish a range of pragmatic functions. But how do speakers distinguish different functions? And how do recipients know what to respond? The aim of this project is to examine the role played in this process by prosody, together with other interactional resources, and to do so from a cross-linguistic perspective, drawing on methods from linguistics, conversation analysis, and multimodal analysis, and bringing together both a qualitative and a quantitative approach