Prosodic salience and the emergence of new decisions: On approving responses to proposals in Finnish workplace interaction

When participants in joint decision-making approve each other's proposals they typically make action declarations (“yea, let's take it”) and/or positive evaluations (“yea, that's good”). This paper focuses on the prosodic features of such ‘approval turns’. Drawing on video-recordings of Finnish workplace interactions, I consider the interactional import of three prosodic patterns. Approval turns that are delivered with a (1) dynamic prosody (increased loudness, excessive pitch movement) establish new decisions, no matter whether the turns are action declarations or positive evaluations. In contrast, approval turns with a (2) flat prosody (decreased loudness, minimal pitch movement) do not—alone—suffice for new decisions to emerge. However, when speakers signal their approval with a (3) flat-stylized prosody (stylized figure, embedded in flat prosodic features), new decisions emerge just like with dynamic approval turns. I argue that the similarity of the sequential consequences of the dynamic and flat-stylized approval turns is related to the fact that in both cases the speakers display a clear emotional stance toward the matter at hand—even though the “valences” of these stances differ from each other. The paper seeks to elucidate the impact of prosodic events in joint decision-making, and the role of emotion as an interactional resource.

► I examine the prosodic delivery of different kinds of approving responses to proposals.
► Lexically, approval turns are commonly action declarations or positive evaluations.
► Approval turns differ as regards their sequential consequences.
► Prosodic salience implies the emergence of new decisions and sequence closure.
► The significance of prosodic salience can be accounted for with reference to emotion.