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B Wells

Publications and source records attributed to B Wells.

75 records · Page 5Linked to original sources
PubMedDate not supplied

Prosodic variation in southern British English.

A neglected aspect of intonation research has been the nature and extent of variability in the use of prosodic features within a speech community. Cross-speaker variability in intonation was investigated through analysis of data collected from 90 adult speakers of English from London, England, using a new prosodic test battery (PEPS). PEPS is designed to elicit information about how speakers use prosodic features to realize different types of linguistic and communicative function in their own speech, and also how they perceive and interpret these features. Although there were no significant effects of gender or age in isolation on prosodic performance, there was a small effect of educational level among younger adults. Despite this group homogeneity, qualitative analysis of data from two of the production tasks showed considerable variation across participants in their use of prosodic features, suggesting that speakers' realization of communicative functions through prosody is more variable than has hitherto been assumed.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Prosody as an interactional resource: turn-projection and overlap.

One aim of current research into talk-in-interaction is to identify the resources that enable recipients to monitor the course of a turn in progress in order to project its upcoming completion. This issue is addressed through analysis of instances of overlapping talk, focusing on their design--that is, their particular prosodic and other linguistic characteristics; their placement--in other words, where precisely they occur in relation to the turn being overlapped; and the subsequent behavior of the coparticipants. Phonetic analysis is combined with interactional techniques developed within Conversation Analysis, to warrant the relevance of categories by reference to the behavior of the participants themselves. As French and Local (1983) found, for an incoming to be treated as turn-competitive, it has to be designed with relatively high pitch and loud volume. These turn-competitive incomings are positioned within the turn in progress, and before the final major accent. By contrast, overlapping incomings positioned after the major accent are not designed as or treated as turn-competitive. On the basis of this analysis, we can define transition relevance place (TRP) as the space between the TRP-projecting accent of the current turn and the onset of the next turn. TRP-projecting accents are identifiable on independent grounds, being phonetically distinct from non-TRP-projecting accents. They thus provide a robust resource for participants to monitor the upcoming completion of the turn.

Adult↗