CONVERSATIONAL FUNCTIONS OF RHYTHMICAL PATTERNING: A BEHAVIOURAL

An intelligent alien who encountered humans in a natural environment could infer on the basis of their speech that they too were intelligent. Provided it had an ability to hear our voices, one of the first things it might notice is that speech is rhythmical and, at the same time, that rhythms in speech fluclualc continuously. On these grounds it might well conclude that we, together with many terrestrial life forms, rely heavily on rhythm for ordinary communication. This paper urges adoption of the alien’s conclusion. However, it also accepts the orthodox view that communication by means of speech depends very much on word-based forms: a human would have to find a means of convincing the alien that, in a given community, speakers communicated not onfy by rhythmical (and other prosodic) means but that they also exploited entities called ‘words’. For this reason, following tradition, word-based forms are recognized as constituting a semi-inde~n~nt province of language. The paper aims at clarifying how rhythmic aspects of speech contribute to communicative between people who know each other well. The approach is novel insofar as it faces up to the issue of how individuals use rhythmical means in bringing about communicative effects. The perspective is justified by fine-grained analysis of a single passage of naturally occurrin