Linguistic anthropologists have long been fascinated by the complex ways in which intonation plays a critical role in the production of ‘non-casual’ speech (Voegelin 1960). Typically prosodic features have been examined in the domains of ritual speech (DuBois 1986, Fox 1988, Voegelin 1960) and verbal art (Briggs 1988). However, recently attention has turned to the examination of more secular domains in which specific alterations in the production of ordinary speech occur: for example, radio sports announcements (Ferguson 1983), auctioneering (Kuiper and Haggo 1984), horse-race calls (Horvath 1991, Kuiper and Austin 1990), and public community announcements (Kroskrity 1993, Tedlock 1983). As argued by Tedlock (1983:190), in both ritual and secular contexts systematic stress and pitch inversion ‘attracts more attention than ordinary delivery and implies that what is being said is “important” the speech event in question “is not ordinary” and will take precedence over any other speech event that may already be in progress’.

This chapter will investigate intonation as a constitutive feature of two related types of speech actions used for the transfer of information about the arrival of incoming planes in a mid-sized American airport: (i) informings within the Operations room (the coordination center for ground operations) and (ii) subsequent announcements from Operations to the Ramp (where baggage is loaded and unloaded). Through analysis of the prosody of these related types of information transfers, I examine how talk gets tailored for a target audience and the space that they inhabit.

Both the Operations room and the Ramp are extremely noisy areas.