Prosodic Cues in Reported Speech: The Case of Retellings

Reporting past conversations is far from being infrequent in everyday interaction. Indeed, speakers often stage past dialogues (Günthner 2002b) by decontextualising the reported utterance from its original context and by recontextualising it in the new communicative situation (Günthner 2002a). In such a polyphonic text (Bakhtin 1986; see also Günthner 2002a), prosodic cues play a paramount role in animating the staged characters, on the one hand, and in revealing the speaker’s stance towards them, on the other hand (Couper-Kuhlen 1999). Given that speaking involves a continuous process of formulating and subsequent reformulating (Schwitalla 2013), linguistic recycling also comes into play when tellers resort to retellings, namely when they reconstruct and reproduce a story that has already been told by the same speaker (Schumann et al. 2015), thus having the opportunity to recontextualise and adjust it according to the new speaking situation. Prosodic characteristics have been a neglected area in the research field of retellings (Barth-Weingarten/Schumann/Wohlfarth 2012). My purpose is to specifically focus on reported speech, in order to discuss how it is constructed and which prosodic characteristics are recurrent from one telling to the next. The methodological framework that I follow is that of conversational analysis; transcripts of spoken data will be discussed with regard to their Feintranskript according to the GAT 2 transcription norms (Selting at al. 2009). My data is derived from selected interviews with second generation German-speaking migrants in Israel taken by Anne Betten (part of the so-called Israelkorpus project, cf. Database for Spoken German (DGD), IDS Mannheim: https://dgd.ids-mannheim.de; subcorpus ISZ). Segments extracted from these will be compared to retold stories recounted in subsequent interviews collected by me (2019), in which the same speakers thematise the same experiences again.