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How Long Does it Take to Say ‘Well’? Evidence from the Audio BNC

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Abstract

This paper reports on an acoustic analysis of ‘well’ in conversation, building on recent attempts at examining the vocal realization of the marker (e.g., Aijmer in Understanding pragmatic markers. A variational pragmatic approach. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2013; Romero-Trillo in Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2018). ‘Well’ is a prime example of a highly multi-functional item performing a large number of distinct pragmatic and syntactic functions. The aim of the study is to test what I call, following Hoey (Lexical priming. A new theory of words and language. Routledge, London/New York, 2005), the ‘priming hypothesis’ suggesting that the syntactic and the pragmatic functions of ‘well’ are distinguishable on acoustic grounds, specifically by the duration they have in conversational speaking turns. The data examined include a subset of 9-word turns extracted from the Audio BNC (Coleman et al. in Audio BNC: the audio edition of the Spoken British National Corpus. Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford, Oxford, 2012) of which the durations of more than 300 tokens of ‘well’ were measured in Praat, an acoustic analysis software (Boersma and Weenink in Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program], http://www.praat.org/, 2012). The results mostly confirm the priming hypothesis: syntactic ‘well’ has significantly longer duration than pragmatic ‘well’. In the concluding sections I discuss this result with a view to the larger question as to how discourse duration enters into the range of factors, including not only duration but also collocation and position in the turn, that hearers in conversation draw on in order to disambiguate the distinct uses of ‘well’. The study also offers intriguing implications for the theory of priming (Hoey in Lexical priming. A new theory of words and language. Routledge, London/New York, 2005), suggesting the possibility that polysemous words are not only primed for certain verbal contexts but also for certain properties pertaining to the non-verbal modalities.

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Notes

  1. ‘Well’ performs a ‘frame’ function when it separates constructed dialog from the surrounding discourse (cf. Jucker 1993), a function here referred to as ‘quote marker’.

  2. This intrinsic orientation toward the hearer makes pragmatic markers key elements of ‘recipient design’ (Sacks 1992). Also, discussions of pragmatic markers often seem unaware that their capacity “to indicate, often in very complex ways, just how the utterance that contains them is a response to, or a continuation of, some portion of the prior discourse” (Levinson 1983: 88), a capacity which makes them resources of discourse deixis (cf. Levinson 1983: 87–88; Levinson 2004: 119).

  3. The notion of ‘tone’ concerns “the upward/downward/level movement of the voice pitch in the Tone Unit” (Romero-Trillo 2015: 6). Tones include, for example, falling, rising, and level tones.

  4. As is standard practice, a Shapiro–Wilk test was used to determine whether normality was violated.

  5. Pre-requests are turns that check a precondition for an action. For example, a customer’s question “Do you have X?” checks the availability of X, which is the precondition for requesting X. According to Levinson (1983), pre-request sequences “properly have a four-position structure” (Levinson 1983: 357), consisting of ‘pre-request’ (‘Do you have X?’), ‘go ahead’ (‘Yes’), ‘request’ (‘Can I have X?’), and ‘response’ (provision of X). Pre-request sequences are often truncated, that is, positions 2 and 3 are ‘skipped’ and the position 1 pre-request is immediately responded to by a position 4 turn granting or denying the request.

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  1. Phiilipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany

    Christoph Rühlemann

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Rühlemann, C. How Long Does it Take to Say ‘Well’? Evidence from the Audio BNC. Corpus Pragmatics 3, 49–66 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-018-0046-y

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