Phonetic resources in the construction of social actions

This chapter considers the role of phonetic resources in making three kinds of offers as explored in Curl (2006). It is shown that offers have no particular phonetic properties of their own, but that instead phonetics is used to handle matters relating to sequence-management and turn-taking. Certain types of action have phonetic exponents, and map on to phonological units, while others do not. It is argued that the traditional units of phonology treat individuals as lone speakers rather than as interactants; giving interaction a role in the design of turns at talk changes the nature of grammar to a more cognitively distributed one.

• Affiliations: 1: University of York