Interactive lexis: prominence and paradigms 20510 A: NOW HE has SAID that HE and his TEAM are WILLing to come
to any NOT WILLing they WANT to come to Every dePART-
ment......
A: i DO hope that the department will co-OPerate on this and
WHEN by co-OPerate WILLing to SPEND some TIME WITH
him and his STAFF who are LONGing to come and TALK
to the dePARTment
B: we’d be VEry pleased to do THAT preSUMably
(837–9:551–687)
A’s first use of willing is subject to ‘contradiction negation’ (Horn 1985) A
seeks a more intense term—and the newly-chosen want is then reiterated
prominently as longing and non-prominently as pleased (B). Meanwhile
willing has re-occurred quite unproblematically (with its original ‘neutral’
meaning?) in A’s second turn. What might seem remarkable is that such
shifts in lexical items hardly ever seem to cause problems of meaning for
listeners; the overlay of phonological prominence removes all potential ambiguities
and conflicts. Such items as occur in (10) belong classically to scales whose
norms are negotiated rather than absolute; their points of reference have to
be agreed upon among speakers but this is part of the discourse process,
and disagreement does not occur. Speakers are aware both of the potential
for discourse-internal scaling and intensification:
11 E: you’d be prePAREed to TEACH and HAppy to...
B: YES keen KEEN to in fact YEAH
(874:181–8)
Here, as one might expect, the intensified relexicalizations are prominent,
and, once again, they occur not just in one speaker’s turn but over speaker-
boundary. Adjective sets such as appalling/terrible (819:876) and amazed/
surprised (130:155–7) occur also in interesting prominence patterns which
suggest that decontextualized attempts to fix them on scales of intensity
miss much of the interactive negotiability of such items in real-time speech.
Perhaps of greater interest is the way in which adverbial intensifiers are
often signalled as equivalent (by non-prominent relexicalizations) in ways
which decontextualized semantics might not predict:
12 A: but he’s SO BUsy
B:M
C: you KNOW
D: yes he’s VEry busy at the MOment
E: YES well he’s ALways frantically BUsy
(101:1055–61)
Frantically is to be heard as equivalent to very which in turn is an intensification
of so. The reverse order occurs too:
13 A: she’s TErribly SErious very SErious girl
(104:1207–8)