Methodological imperatives for investigating the phonetic organisation and phonological structures of spontaneous speech

We describe and exemplify a methodology for providing an integratedaccount of the communicative function of parametric phonetic detail and its rela-tionshipwith interactional organization. We exemplify our analytic approach bydocumenting two different phonetic designs of stand-alone ‘so’ in a corpus ofrecorded American English telephone conversations. These two designs - whichencompass particular loudness, pitch and laryngeal characteristics - correlate withdifferent communicative functions and have different consequences for the inter-actional-sequential organization of the talk. We argue that if phonology is to betruly concerned with function and linguistic contrast, we need to induce thosefunctions and domains of contrast from a thoroughgoing phonetic and sequentialanalysis of talk-in-interaction.