Prosodic salience and the emergence of new decisions : On the prosody of approval in Finnish workplace interaction

When participants, in joint decision-making, approve each other’s proposals, they typically make action-declarations (e.g., “yea, let’s take it”) and/or positive evaluations (e.g., “yea, this is good”). This paper focuses on the prosodic features of such ‘approval-turns’. Drawing on video-recordings of Finnish workplace interactions, I consider the interactional import of three different prosodic patterns. Approval-turns that are delivered with a (1) dynamic prosody (increased loudness, excessive pitch movement, etc.) establish new decisions, no matter whether the turns are action-declarations or positive evaluations. In contrast, approval-turns with a (2) flat prosody (decreased loudness, minimal pitch movement, etc.) do not—alone—suffice for new decisions to emerge. However, when speakers signal their approval with a (3) flat-stylized prosody (stylized figure, embedded in flat prosodic features), new decisions emerge just like with dynamic approval-turns. I argue that the similarity of the sequential consequences of the dynamic and flat-stylized approval-turns is related to the fact that, in both cases, the speakers display a clear emotional stance toward the matter at hand—even while the “valences” of these stances differ from each other. The paper seeks to elucidate the impact of prosodic events in joint decision-making, and the role of emotion displays as an interactional resource.Peer reviewe