On Some Interactional and Phonetic Properties of Increments to Turns in Talk-in-Interaction

This report is based on phonetic and interactional analysis of a collection of increments drawn from audio recordings of British and North American talk-in-interaction. An increment is a grammatically fitted continuation of a turn at talk following the reaching of a point of possible syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic completion. Parametric phonetic analysis reveals that a range of phonetic parameters (including pitch, loudness, rate of articulation, and articulatory characteristics) mark out an increment as a continuation of its host. Interactional analysis reveals that increments deal with a range of interactional exigencies including, but not limited to, possible problems of understanding and alignment arising from the host turn. 1 Increments: an overview and exemplification 1 There are occasions in talk-in-interaction where a speaker reaches a point of possible syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic completion, and at some point soon after that completion elects to continue talking, doing so in such a way that the continuation is grammatically parasitic on the prior talk. Six exemplars of this practice are shown in the arrowed turns of Fragments 1 to 6 (see Appendix for transcription conventions). (1) smc.dollars.I29 (face-to-face; dyadic) 1 G: mmm .hhhh do you know what people have to pa:y 2 at Legends if they're not a student 3 (0.4)