How we say what we mean

Recently, linguists have begun to study a fascinating intersection of language: discourse and the 'paralinguistic' phenomena that help accomplish social meaning. Conversations are potentially messy social situations, yet we manage to communicate in groups without cue cards telling us when to come in, when someone's turn is complete, etc. One of the ways talk is managed is by the production and perception of paralinguistic phenomena such as pitch, intonation, tempo, and voice quality that mark important discursive events. Apparently how we say something is every bit as important as what we say.

Ogden, R. (2006). Phonation and social action in agreements and disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics (38): 1752-1775.

Ogden uses data from corpora of natural conversations and identifies similar stretches of talk based on linguistic and pragmatic aspects. Specifically, he identifies instances of agreement and disagreement based on the concept of “assessments” and their structure from the field of Conversation Analysis. Ogden uses a pitch track created in Praat to compare the utterances. He finds that the assessments that agree with a previous opinion by a different speaker use a large pitch span (including some creaky voice), “dynamic pitch contours,” slower tempo, and “tenser articulations” (1762). Overt disagreements also share these aspects but are timed directly on the heels of the first speaker’s utterance. Indirect disagreements padded with an initial weak agreement were produced more quickly and quietly (1767), the weak agreement ending in a low-high contour (1768).