Who's got the power?

It is said that the real meanings of utterances can only be understood (if it really can) by analyzing how they are actually said in the context of interaction. A powerful tool speakers have at their disposal in oral communciation is, of course, intonation. As we all have studied, a tone used at different moments may be accompanying (or, probably, realizing) different meanings. Let's consider the following conversation*. Remember that the marking you will find represents only one version of the multiple possible options of reading, or better still, saying things in actual conversation.    

You may have seen that almost every tone option is exploited in this conversation. Both speakers, for example, use the rising, a tone said to express dominance or some kind of power (Brazil, 1997). In addition, you may have noticed that each speaker has a specific function: Kurtis, probably, being a customer service agent and Salena, a dissatisfied customer. Who do you think is powerful? Do you think power remains constant in a conversation?

In the passage OK, let me just pull up your account. Just a moment, the speaker has the power to conduct the conversation following a procedure (normally scripted, for instance,  for call centers), and so he controls communication at this stage, telling the hearer that she has to wait until he accesses her account and does what needs to be done. In this light, we can make sense of this use of this so-called dominant tone.

At a certain moment, the customer says I've been down that road. A few times in fact. Apart from being shared information at this stage (hence the use of the referring tone), these tone units represent Salena's complaint to the company for a service that hasn't probably been rendered properly. It can be said that she adopts a powerful position at this time, questioning the information passed by Kurtis and stating that she shouldn't be experiencing what she actually is. 

This little analysis goes to say that we can't say a priori that in a two-party conversation like the one above, one speaker (for whatever reason) will systematically be powerful and the other, powerless. As much as everything in life, oral communication is more dynamic and sometimes unpredictable, with power possibly being fought for by any speaker at any stage.   

    

* The text above was adapted from

Varra, R. (2006). Easy American idioms. New York: Living Language.


Reference
Brazil, D. (1997). The communicative value of intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Intonation of questions

A great deal has been written on the intonation of questions. Some people have said that for a question to be heard as such, we need a rising tone (as you may infer from the picture). But we have already studied a couple of examples that contradict this assertion. We may well say Are you Claire? with a fall on Claire, which would perfectly be understood as a kind of seeking-information question, as though we were inviting our interlocutor to expand on some other info. This is but one example. You may find more theory on the Internet.

If you click here, you will find a downloadable file containing some explanations of meanings that can be attached to questions and other types of utterances on the basis of the intonation choices (mainly tones) in them. Remember that the system we're using is called Discourse Intonation and that other systems may use alternative names and offer alternative explanations for the choices. The file just referred to will be available for ten days as of publication of this posting. Hurry up and get it! Then, get back to this page and make your comments or ask any questions.  

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I'm sorry to tell you that Scribd (the page hosting the file) asks you to have a Facebook account or a Scribd account. It's easy to have either. Another option can be to do some copying and then pasting onto a Word doc. But this will require further editing (for instance, reducing font type and size). So I'd advise you to try opening an account in one of the ways suggested and use it later on for other purposes.  

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So following Nico's suggestion, here's the link that will take you to the file right away, without any subscription or sign-in requirements. If an error message pops up or a notice says that the file is damaged or anything, just click on the address bar once to get it highlighted and then press enter. It will now be shown correctly. To download, proceed as usual.

Some modifications in connected speech

Consider the transcription of the following text about the school and some of its roles in society. If you want to check out the real text, read it from your course handbook. 

First of all, it may be important to consider that a whole lot of words in English have alternative pronunciations, especially if these alternatives involve weakening (= the use of weak forms of pronunciation in unstressed syllables). Consequently, we may say (and, therefore, transcribe) words in different ways. For instance, we may say environment in one of, at least, three ways, namely, /ɪnˈvaɪərən mənt/, /ɪnˈvaɪrn̩mənt/, or /ɪnˈvaɪrəmmənt /, the last one including assimilation of /n/ to /m/. In the text transcribed above, I have shown some of these possibilities. You'll find that a number of alternatives appear in italicized symbols. As I've just said, this means that there are more options than the one given. 

What other examples have you found in this transcription? I'd like to hear you all on this!