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Other-repetition sequences in Finland Swedish: Prosody, grammar, and context in action ascription

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Martina Huhtamäki ,
Jan Lindström  and
Anne-Marie Londen
Martina Huhtamäki
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki, Finland
Jan Lindström*
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki, Finland
Anne-Marie Londen
Affiliation:
University of Helsinki, Finland
*
Address for correspondence: Jan K. Lindström Dept. of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian, and Scandinavian Studies, P.O. Box 24, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finlandjan.k.lindstrom@helsinki.fi
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Abstract

This study examines other-repetitions in Finland Swedish talk-in-interaction: their sequential trajectories, prosodic design, and lexicogrammatical features. The key objective is to explore how prosody can contribute to the action conveyed by a repetition turn, that is, whether it deals with a problem of hearing or understanding, a problem of expectation, or just registers receipt of information. The analysis shows that large and upgraded prosodic features (higher onset, wider pitch span than the previous turn) co-occur with repair- and expectation-oriented repetitions, whereas small, downgraded prosody (lower onset, narrower pitch span than the previous turn) is characteristic of registering. However, the distinguishing strength of prosody is mostly gradient (rather than discrete), and because of this, other concomitant cues, most notably the speakers’ epistemic positions in relation to the repeated item, are also of importance for ascribing a certain pragmatic function to a repetition. (Repetition, other-repetition, action ascription, prosody in conversation, repair, epistemics, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, Finland Swedish)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Other-Repetition in Conversation across Languages , September 2020 , pp. 653 - 686
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

We are deeply indebted to Giovanni Rossi for his guidance and extensive comments on our work on this article. We would also like to thank Rasmus Persson and Richard Ogden, who commented on earlier versions of our text, as well as three anonymous reviewers for very helpful feedback. In addition, we wish to thank Madeleine Forsén for making a number of new recordings for our corpus and excerpting cases of potential interest in that material. This study was supported by the Finnish Center of Excellence in Research on Intersubjectivity in Interaction (Academy of Finland/University of Helsinki). We thank the research program Interaction and Variation in Pluricentric Languages (funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, grant nr. M12-0137:1) for access to data on Swedish service encounters.

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