Leading phonetician, Klaus J. Kohler, invites you to discuss Communicative Functions and Linguistic Forms in Speech Interaction

BY VICTORIA WILLINGALE, ON OCTOBER 19TH, 2018

Cambridge University Press has published the linguistic monograph Kohler, K. J. (2017). Communicative Functions and Linguistic Forms in Speech Interaction (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 156). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this Blog I, the author, introduce it to you and draw your attention to its new scientific message for spoken-language research.

Let us begin with a couple of questions.

Are you interested in how speech communication works in human interaction?

Do you study speech forms as anchored in communicative functions?

If you are a phonetician or a linguist or a psychologist in speech recognition and understanding or a sociologist in speech communication and conversation analysis or a communications engineer your answer to both Polarity Questions should be positive, and I would express this expectation by combining these syntactic interrogatives with falling intonation in the spoken medium.

You aren’t interested?

You don’t study form in function?

in declarative syntactic structure, combined, when spoken, either with falling intonation in high register, or with a falling + high rising intonation contour. Both patterns pick up the negative answers to my preceding questions, expressing surprise at the negative answers and asking to reconsider them. The falling-rising pattern adds incredulity to surprise.

[email protected].

https://www.ipds.uni-kiel.de/kjk/.

Interested in reading more? Read Chapter 1. Speech Communication in Human Interaction