It goes without saying that in spoken interaction we react to a lot more than the words our utterances are made up of: a ‘tone of voice’, a ‘feeling’ about the way our partner spoke, the ‘atmosphere’ of a conversation – these are often more significant cues to the real message than the words themselves. How does this interactional meaning (as opposed to the semantic or pragmatic meaning of words and utterances) come about? What are the cues that help to make social interaction more than the mere exchange of words, namely a real-time encounter between conversationalists who establish and negotiate units of talk as situated meaningful activity? It is our conviction, and the conviction of the contributors to this volume, that at least some of the cues in everyday live speech events are prosodic in nature, involving auditory parameters such as pitch, loudness and duration and the categories they jointly constitute.

As we are concerned with prosody in natural social interaction, in particular conversation in its widest sense, our object of study is on the border between linguistics and the social sciences. In both areas the respective fields – the linguistic study of prosody and the social scientific study of verbal interaction – have long-standing traditions. However, so far they have seldom taken cognizance of one another. Yet if prosody is as important a signalling device in interaction as our everyday intuitions suggest, then the reconstruction of its relevant forms and functions require that it be studied empirically on the basis of data from natural verbal interaction.