Transition relevance and the phonetic design of English call openings

Recent work at the interface of phonetics and Conversation Analysis has been concerned with the functional import of the phonetic design of talk. One particular challenge has been to understand how and if the phonetic design of talk affects its interpretation. This paper examines the impact of phonetic design on sequential structure and it’s role in signalling transition relevance.Focusing on call openings the paper examines whether different/same phonetics have different/same effects at different/same places in interactional structure. In order to do so, it considers the role of pitch contours and other phonetic features in first spoken turns (T1) in signalling transition relevance. It examines whether certain pitch-contour shapes deployed at T1 result in different uptakes by the recipient and producer of the second turn (T2). The analysis shows that:
• the function of turn-final pitch accents at T1 is to project possible transition relevance;
• at this place in interactional structure the choice between final rising and falling contours is constrained by the lexico-syntactic design of the turn;
• callers’ actions at T2 are not conditioned by the prosodic design of T1.These findings raise theoretical and methodological issues about the study of prosodic features of speech.