The Handbook of Discourse Analysis

30 Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
(see also Pittenger et al. 1960 and Laver 1994). Whether loudness declination is coextensive
with pitch declination is an open question. Moreover, how loudness declination is
handled across turns requires investigation: Goldberg (1978) suggests that amplitude
may shift or reset at structural points in discourse organization just as pitch has been
shown to do.
Second and more significantly, paralinguistic voice-quality effects require investigation
(see also Pike 1945; Trager 1958; Pittenger et al. 1960). This step of course goes
not only beyond the intonation phrase and beyond intonation but beyond prosody
altogether. Yet it is a logical step if one’s goal is to reconstruct the vocal cues which
contextualize language. Just as the same interpretive frame can be cued by pitch and
timing at once, so it can also be cued by paralinguistic voice quality. Voice quality has
often been thought of as resulting from the natural or habitual setting of laryngeal
and supralaryngeal musculature in the vocal tract (Laver 1980). Yet speakers can and
do assume different voice qualities at will. Some of those which appear to be deployed
strategically in everyday English conversation are nasal voice, breathy voice, creaky
voice, “smiley” voice, whisper, and falsetto. Others can and surely will be found on
closer investigation. Here too the question must be: what resources do speakers have
at their disposal? And how are these resources deployed in cueing interaction? The
answers must be sensitive to possible sociolinguistic and sociocultural variation, but
above all grounded in conversational interaction.
NOTES
1 I am grateful nonetheless to Wally
Chafe, Jack Du Bois, and Sandy
Thompson for listening to an early
version of this chapter at the
Linguistics Colloquium, University
of California at Santa Barbara, and
talking through the ideas with me.
I bear full responsibility for not
taking their advice when I should
have.
2 Outside of linguistics, on the other
hand, it was generally acknowledged
as a prime metacommunicative device
in face-to-face interaction. See e.g.
Bateson et al. (n.d.) and Pittenger
et al. (1960) for two early attempts
to capture it on paper and describe
its import.
3 Menn and Boyce (1982) was an early
attempt to link quantified
measurements of voice pitch with
discourse structure.
4 Excluded from this survey are
corpus-linguistic studies of discourse,
many of which take intonation into
consideration without making it the
focus of investigation.
5 “Grammar” being understood loosely
enough to include speech acts.
6 As does a fortiori Steedman (1991).
7 Nor is Ann’s onset in line 52 as high
as in line 23, where she is perceived
as starting high.
8 Subsequent talk confirms that
Janet knows not only that Jane has
recently gone back to Tanzania but
also why.
9 In addition, some analysts recognize
the narrowing or widening of a
speaker’s register as significant
departures from the norm
(see Pittenger et al. 1960).
10 Occasionally nonadjacent accented
syllables also mark off rhythmic