Language & Cognition seminar - Dr Marina Cantarutti

Phonetics as a resource for solving participant problems in interaction: Evidence from collaborative productions in English

This talk will present a number of reflections about the role of phonetics in everyday interaction. Talk in interaction evolves temporally and incrementally, and participants manage a number of problems as speakers “get things done” through talk; problems around turn-taking and participation, the organisation of sequences of action and the contextualisation of affective and evaluative stances towards what they are saying and each other. These orders of organisation are “problems” that participants jointly manage by deploying a number of semiotic resources -including phonetic detail- that concurrently and in complex ways orient to these moment-by-moment interactional issues that need to be addressed. Moreover, the phonetic design of turns is seen to not only to orient to the interactional needs and contingencies of the current speaker, but also to the design features of prior turns by other participants.  

By reviewing the findings of research conducted from the perspectives of conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) and interactional linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 2001), this talk will present a number of reflections around the role of phonetics in everyday interaction (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting, 1996; Local & Walker, 2005; Ogden, 2021).  Using as evidence prior research on collaborative productions (anticipatory completions, Other-continuations, choral productions, and co-animation, see e.g. Lerner 1996, 2004; Szczepek-Reed, 2006, 2010; Cantarutti, 2019, 2020), a proposal will be made for the study of phonetic phenomena within a multimodal and interactional view of language. It will be shown how viewing phonetics in and as (inter)action allows us to see phonetics as a complex resource made up of different parameters acting in complementary or redundant ways with other semiotic systems to solve everyday interactional problems.