Gender, interaction and intonational variation: The discourse functions of High Rising Terminals in London

Levon, Erez (2016). Gender, interaction and intonational variation: The discourse functions of High Rising Terminals in London. Journal of sociolinguistics, 20(2), pp. 133-163. Wiley 10.1111/josl.12182

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In this paper, I examine the different conversational and interactional functions that High Rising Terminals (HRT) fulfil among young, White, middle-class speakers of London English. Data are drawn from sixteen small-group interviews with forty-two individuals (28 women and 14 men) aged 18–25. From this corpus, 7351 declarative Intonation Phrases were extracted, and auditorily coded for the presence/absence of HRT as well as for a variety of social, interactional and pragmatic factors. I combine quantitative and qualitative methods to demonstrate that while all of the speakers investigated use HRT to accomplish relational work in conversation, the specific interactional strategies that the feature is recruited to perform differ markedly across genders. I consider the ramifications of this finding for our understanding of ‘politeness’ as a gendered practice, and illustrate the importance of examining a variable like HRT in its discourse-functional context.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Other Institutions > Walter Benjamin Kolleg (WBKolleg) > Center for the Study of Language and Society (CSLS)

UniBE Contributor:

Levon, Erez

Subjects:

300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
400 Language
400 Language > 410 Linguistics
400 Language > 420 English & Old English languages

ISSN:

1360-6441

Publisher:

Wiley

Language:

English

Submitter:

Erez Levon

Date Deposited:

14 Jun 2021 10:43

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 15:47

Publisher DOI:

10.1111/josl.12182

BORIS DOI:

10.7892/boris.152299

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/152299

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