Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

GERARD O'GRADY, CARDIFF UNIVERSITYPITCH CONCORD AND THE PROJECTION OF (DIS)AGREEMENT IN POLITICALDIALOGUEThe year 2010 was a momentous one for the conduct of British politics. For the firsttime the competing major party leaders debated live on national television. As theelection campaign unfolded it became clear that it was unlikely that any of themajor parties would win enough votes to enable them to form a government.Hence all three leaders were compelled within the debates to balance the need tostake out their own positions while not seeming to overtly disagree with potentialcoalition partners. Within each debate a period of time was allotted to ‘dialogue’between the leaders who were permitted some space to question and challengeone another. This paper examines the intonational choices of the three leaderswithin these spaces. Speakers in conversation align themselves with theirinterlocutors chiefly through the use of in-group lexis, attitudinal lexis, Moodselections, (Eggins and Slade 1997). A further resource which they can choose tosignal their alignment with the audience is pitch concord, (Brazil 1997, Cheng et al2008, O’Grady 2010).The theory of pitch concord states that speakers are sensitive to the final pitch levelof the previous speaker’s utterance and that they signal their cooperative behaviourby responding with a similar pitch height. At speaker turns, the second interlocutorhas an option of signalling alignment with the previous speaker by beginning histurn with the same pitch height. In the unmarked case we would expect that thealignment would also be signalled by lexico-grammatical choices. However,speakers have the option of projecting a mixed message: disagreement throughtheir lexico-grammatical choices and solidarity through their intonational choices.This paper examines how the three leaders positioned themselves through theirchoices of pitch concord vis-à-one another.ReferencesBrazil, D 1997. The Communicative Value of Intonation in English. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.Cheng, W., C. Greaves & M. Warren. 2008. A Corpus- driven Study of Discourse Intonation.Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Eggins. S. & D. Slade. 1997 Analysing Casual Conversation. London: Cassell.O’Grady. G. 2010. A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse: The Intonation of Increments.London: Continuum.PAPER SESSION 9B - ROOM 2 - FRIDAY, 28 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 76 Lisbon, July 2011