Prosodic constructions are recurring temporal patterns of prosodic activity that express specific meanings and functions. These typically involve not only pitch contours but also energy, rate, timing and articulation properties, and may involve synchronized contributions by two participants.

Schedule

Session 1: Compositional and Constructional Aspects of Prosody

Inspect: Innovating Speech Elicitation Techniques. Oliver Niebuhr

Computational decomposition and reassembly of rich global prosody. Yi Xu, Fang Liu, Santitham Prom-on

Prosodic Constructions for Contrast, Complaint, and Contradiction; and their Common Elements (abstract). Nigel Ward

Discussant: Oliver Niebuhr

Session 2: Prosodic Constructions and Turn-Taking

Prosodic Matching and Turn Competition in Multi-Party Conversations Jan Gorisch, Emina Kurtic, Ella Page, Bill Wells, Guy Brown, Laurent Prevot

Pitch matching - absolute or relative? On prosodic orientation across speaker changes. Melisa Stevanovic, Mietta Lennes

Some notes on prosody, processing, and turn-taking. Jan De Ruiter

Discussant: Richard Ogden

Session 3: Prosodic Constructions and Action

The prosodic deletion of action boundaries in German interaction. Beatrice Szczepek Reed

Repetition, prosody and sequential organisation in French talk-in-interaction. Rasmus Persson

Interpersonal Functions of Prosodic Greeting Constructions: Evidence from Experiments with Robots. Maria Ibh Crone Aarestrup, Kerstin Fischer.

Discussant: Richard Ogden

Session 4: Prosodic Constructions and Gesture

Parallels between hand gestures and acoustic prosodic features in turn-taking. Margaret Zellers, David House

Study of the prosody-gesture interface in the acquisition of "preterito perfeito simples" tense in Brazilian Portuguese. Marcia Cristina Romero Lopes, Christelle Dodane, Alessandra Del Re

A Multimodal Analysis of the Mm Token in Chilean Spanish Interaction. Veronica Gonzalez Temer, Richard Ogden

Discussant: Oliver Niebuhr

Motivation and Scope

Appropriate prosody is critical to effective interaction. Subtle variations in pitch, loudness, rate and aspects of timing can efficiently convey turn-taking intentions, information status, confidence, and so on. Native speakers effortlessly use prosody to convey such information, but there are still significant gaps in our knowledge about the forms and functions of prosody in unscripted dialog.

In the 1970s, specific intonation contours were identified and linked to specific meanings and functions. Critically, meanings in such models are not tied to a single prosodic parameter nor to a single prosodic event in time, rather they are pattern-based. This line of work was variously criticized as insufficiently reductionist, too abstract, difficult to apply to naturally occurring talk, monolog-oriented, hard to formalize, neglectful of prosodic features other than pitch, and lacking experimental support.

More recent work has overcome many of these problems, elucidating, for example, the prosodic behaviors involved in complaining (O01), giving in (N13), inviting back-channels (W14), producing upgraded assessments (O12, W14), questioning and using questions for various purposes (H03, H04, H10, L12, CK12, S12), calling (DO13), contradicting (H03), topic transitions (CK04), summing up (P13) and turn-taking (G12). The panel will discuss these constructions and others, compare approaches and models, and situate this work within the larger enterprise of describing dialog practices.

This panel will include empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions from diverse approaches: conversation analysis, experimental, statistical, modeling, and others. It will address the form and function of specific prosodic constructions; multi-modal investigations; work on the nature, utility, and limitations of construction-based approaches to dialog prosody; and work on how the realizations of prosodic constructions vary, for example, with other factors affecting prosodic form, with temporal and cognitive limitations that constrain speakers, with individual speakers, and with multiple simultaneous goals, whether coherent or misaligned.

Organizers

Nigel Ward
University of Texas at El Paso

Richard Ogden
University of York

Oliver Niebuhr
University of Southern Denmark

Nancy Hedberg
Simon Fraser University