Where Prosody Meets Pragmatics

Book excerpt: This volume demonstrates the synergies that can result from interdisciplinary collaboration. Responding to the growing interest in the interface between prosody and pragmatics, it presents a collection of papers which use different approaches and data to explore a wide range of interrelated issues in both fields. The volume contains a state-of-the-art introduction by the editors, and individual chapters organised in three sections. In the first section, chapters by Sasha Calhoun, Joe Blythe, Merle Horne and Phoenix Lam examine prosodic cues to referential and discourse/textual meaning. The second section is devoted to the role played by prosody in the negotiation of speaker change in conversational interaction, with papers by Dagmar Barth-Weingarten, Jill House, Emina Kurtic/Guy J. Brown/Bill Wells and Beatrice Szczepek Reed. In the final section, chapters by Leendert Plug, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen and Anne-Catherine Simon/Liesbeth Degand focus on various aspects of interpersonal meaning and how they are conveyed. Languages discussed are English, Dutch, German, Swedish, French and Murriny Patha, and the frameworks used include Conversation Analysis, Gricean pragmatics, Interactional Linguistics, Intonational Phonology, Phonology for Conversation and Relevance Theory.