Methodological imperatives for investigating the phonetic organization and phonological structures of spontaneous...

We describe and exemplify a methodology for providing an integrated account of the communicative function of parametric phonetic detail and its relationship with interactional organization. We exemplify our analytic approach by documenting two different phonetic designs of stand-alone 'so' in a corpus of recorded American English telephone conversations. These two designs - which encompass particular loudness, pitch and laryngeal characteristics - correlate with different communicative functions and have different consequences for the interactional- sequential organization of the talk. We argue that if phonology is to be truly concerned with function and linguistic contrast, we need to induce those functions and domains of contrast from a thorough going phonetic and sequential analysis of talk-in-interaction.