Interactional Prosody: The Stuy Of Speaker’s Onset Design Of English Multi-party Conflict Talk

This dissertation aims to investigate the onset design of multi-party conflict talk by employing the methodology of combining conversation analysis and phonetic observation. The study takes a stand in Interactional Linguistics which draws hypotheses that linguistic sources are constructed through social interaction. Onset in this study refers to the first pitch accent of speaker’s turn initial intonation phrase. The writer of this dissertation addresses the following two questions mainly:(1) how is the talk organized in the institutional setting of television debate and what is the interactional pattern in this speech event?(2) What is the onset design under such a form of conflict talk and in what way does it relate to the speaker’s preference organization?In order to tackle the above research questions, the study adopted the approach of phonetic analysis through the sequence analysis of the Final Prime Minister Debate,which is a natural language event. An improved version of the JEFFERSON TRANSCRIPTION SYSTEM was applied in the data processing, in order to provide a clear analysis basis.The research results have shown that there exists a sequential order in television debate, which influences greatly the summon-answer sequence embedded in the setting. This order enhances speaker’s turn obligation, allowing for turn prediction and preparation as well. Speakers’ onset level detected in the study shows a trend of rising along with the progression of the conflict even though fluctuates by a combination of factors as well. Latched onset and terminal onset are more salient onset categories in this situation, which well promote the positive image of each participant. Pitch matching is employed by participants to achieve situational accommodation, while non-pitch matching reveals the fact that efforts power control can be found among the same class of participants. It can be inferred from results above that the preference organization of multi-party conflict talk is associated with a series of preference principles which are sequentially aligned.The present study takes the interactional perspective towards linguistic elementsin daily conversation, addressing the fact that linguistic forms and meaning are greatly associated with social interaction. This will also contribute to the interactive teaching in classrooms, and the author believes that successful language acquisition should be achieved through an authentic interactive process.