Amplitude Shift: A MECHANISM FOR THE AFFILIATION OF UTTERANCES IN CONVERSATIONAL INTERACTION

Publisher Summary Over the course of natural conversational interaction, speakers routinely produce gross shifts in the amplitude level of their successive utterances. There is a range of conversational environments in which the work of such amplitude shifts are intuitively apparent. This chapter focuses on another domain in which the amplitude shifts in speakers' utterances are conversationally organized. The chapter focuses exclusively on the question/answer sequence. Two hundred question/answer exchanges were extracted for measurement from 22 two-party telephone interactions. The speakers' shifts in peak amplitude level of their own successive utterances over the course of a conversation are quite routine occurrences. The shifts in peak amplitude of speakers' successive utterances over the course of a question/answer sequence are regularly patterned.