2020/04/16 by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth Couper‐Kuhlen
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research
paper · doi:10.1017/s004740452000024x
openalex publication_date 2020/04/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Abstract This study explores the link between prosody and other-repetition in a moderately large collection from everyday English talk-in-interaction (n = 200). British English and North American English cases were analysed separately in order to track possible varietal differences. Of initial interest was the question whether focal pitch accents might disambiguate among other-repetition actions, both those related to repair and those that go beyond repair. The results indicate that only two out of six possible other-repetition actions are associated with distinct focal pitch contours in the two varieties. For all other repair and beyond-repair actions speakers use many of the same pitch contours nondistinctively. Overall, falling contours appear more frequently in British other-repetitions, while rising contours are more frequent in North American other-repetitions. In conclusion, it is argued that in addition to pitch contour, prosodic features such as pitch span, loudness, and timing are crucial in distinguishing other-repetition actions, as are nonprosodic factors such as epistemic access (often reflected in oh -prefacing) and visible behavior. (Repair initiation, surprise, challenge, registering, pitch accents, oh -preface, epistemics)*