on e-mails stripping tone, arguments coming to conclusions, melifluousness,
and breakfast:
"[a bunch of people] question the view that 'words, phrases, and sentences
make up the core of language and that prosody is somehow derivative, and can
be treated as an expressive overlay that supplements or modulates the more
basic propositional content' [Gumperz, Prosody in Conversation]. Instead
they draw on the idea that 'without prosody there can be no conversing. It
is prosody that animates talk and in large part determines its situated
characteristics. Only through prosody do sentences become turns at speaking
and come to be seen as actions performed by living actors' . . . if it is the
case . . . it might be that prosody is one of the aspects of language which
cannot be made exhaustively explicit without inducing psychotic collapse.
It's hard to imagine the argument over the breakfast table ever coming to an
end: 'it wasn't the fact that you asked me to drop the car over at David's
that irritated me, it was the way you ended your sentence with a
sequence-terminating monophthongal oh-token'. If reconciliation depends,
that is, not, contrary to some views, on all implicit assumptions being made
explicit, but rather on there being some modes of mutual understanding, of
cognition, which remain implicit, it may be a kind of psychosis, bent on the
monologic comprehension and digestion of intersubjectivity, which wishes to
make every last note of our conversation yield up its sense or function to
the map. This might suggest that those who take prosody seriously should
raise as many difficulties as possible in the face of the ever more strident
demand to specify their own method."
Simon Jarvis
Prosody as Cognition,
Critical Quarterly, vol 40, no. 4, Winter 1998
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