Page 220 - Beyond Methods

208 Contextualizing linguistic input below, conventions of English require primary stress on the word or
phrase providing the new information requested in the question.
1. Who did you give the tickets to? 1a. I gave the tickets to him.
2. What did you give him?
2a. I gave the tickets to him.
3. Who gave the tickets to him? 3a. I gave the tickets to him.
Users of English who are unaware of such a convention might answer the same questions with the following stress pattern:
1. Who did you give the tickets to? 1b. I gave the tickets to him.
2. What did you give him?
2b. I gave the tickets to him.
3. Who gave the tickets to him? 3b. I gave the tickets to him.
Such responses could be confusing because they do not adhere to the convention that the most heavily stressed words in the an- swers would signal the information requested. A lack of knowledge of such a convention may easily lead to miscommunication.
In addition to emphasizing pieces of information, extralinguis- tic features also show a speaker’s intended or unintended attitudes toward the message or the messenger. Participants in a conversa- tion provide what Gumperz (1982) has called conversational cues through the use of extralinguistic features. The cues in turn help them with their conversational inference “by means of which par- ticipants in an exchange assess others’ intentions, and on which they base their responses” (Gumperz, 1982, p. 153). According to Gum- perz, contextualization cues operate at different levels ranging from prosodic features of stress and intonation to lexical formulations.
We saw in the previous chapter how a London bus driver of West Indian origin was perceived to be rude because he put the stress on the wrong word. Providing yet another example, Gumperz (1982, p. 173) showed how Indian and Pakistani women serving in a cafe- teria at a British airport were perceived as “surly and uncoopera-