Prosody in Interaction

Prosody is constitutive for spoken interaction. In more than 25 years, its study has grown into a full-fledged and very productive field with a sound catalogue of research methods and principles. This volume presents the state of the art, illustrates current research trends and uncovers potential directions for future research. It will therefore be of major interest to everyone studying spoken interaction. The collection brings together an impressive range of internationally renowned scholars from different, yet closely related and compatible research traditions which have made a significant contribution to the field. They cover issues such as the units of language, the contextualization of actions and activities, conversational modalities and genres, the display of affect and emotion, the multimodality of interaction, language acquisition and aphasia. All contributions are based on empirical, audio- and/or video-recorded data of natural talk-in-interaction, including languages such as English, German and Japanese. The methodologies employed come from Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics.

Michal Piotrowski, University of Lodz, in Journal of Pragmatics Vol. 61 (2014):
The main advantage of the book is the emphasis placed on experimental, as opposed to impressionistic, phonetics. Moreover, the authors base their research on corpora, highlighting the importance of naturally occurring speech in the analysis of prosody. Yet another crucial factor that contributes to the high quality of the volume is the fact that the papers show an important academic direction which researchers of prosody in interaction may follow. The contributions are thought-provoking, which applies also to the commenting papers which are of immense value to the readers, as they provide them with instantaneous criticism or elaboration of the preceding articles. [...] The volume is a fine collection of papers, which should be of interest to many researchers of interaction and/or prosody.