The devil is in the detail:an interactional-phonetic study of G-word interjections and some methodological implications

This paper illustrates the methodological contributions of Conversation Analysis-Interactional Linguistics to the study of the phonetic and prosodic design of interactional phenomena using conversational corpora. It presents as a case study the analysis of a collection of 74 “(Oh) (my) God” interjections from 3 hours of the CallFriend corpus. We argue that to fully describe conversational practices an initial exhaustive qualitative approach is required that jointly incorporates interactional and parametric phonetic analyses, so as to better inform how data is to be grouped according to interactionally-relevant criteria (i.e. position, composition, and action) and what phonetic-prosodic features can get eventually measured and compared. This study demonstrates how phonetic-prosodic phenomena that quantative results may treat as outliers or which get hidden in the sea of de-contextualised aggregate data are in fact speakers’ orientations to particular moment-by-moment interactional demands of the local context and thus have an import and organisation of their own.