Two contours, two meanings: the intonation of jaja in German phone conversations

This paper shows that jaja ‘yes yes ’ sequences in German conversations carry two distinct interactional meanings cued by their intonation and sequential placement. Combined Conversation Analytic (CA) and Intonation Phonological analyses indicate that jaja tokens uttered with H * L-% intonation (following GToBI [10]) convey that the previous speaker has persisted too long in a specific course of (verbal) action which should therefore be stopped. By contrast, jaja tokens with L+H * L- % intonation are used in situations of fractured intersubjectivity, i.e., immediately after speakers misalign: with the jaja turn, its speaker treats the action/content of the previous speaker’s utterance as either unwarranted or self-evident. Speaking rate and regional dialectal differences notwithstanding, the two types of contour show significantly different peak alignment, and correspond to two distinct ‘peak accent ’ nuclear contours. 1