Making sense of '–ing' and '–in'

Walking the dog? Or walkin’ the dog?

Language learners living alongside native speakers need to cope with the variation that native speakers use quite unconsciously. For example, if you are a native speaker of English, you probably don’t notice that you vary your pronunciation of the –ing in words like walking or ceiling in very systematic ways, using ‘in’, for example, more often if you are male, more often when you are speaking informally, and more often when –ing is part of a verb.  Language learners are not taught that this is what native speakers do, but have to work it out for themselves.

Research summarised in a previous posting looked at how Polish adult learners of English dealt with variation in –ing, which does not exist in Polish (http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.fr/2012/07/staying-or-goin.html ). In another study, Miriam Meyerhoff and Erik Schleef’s research focuses on teenage migrants from Poland to the UK. They found that some patterns of variation are easier to acquire than others and that, surprisingly, it is the social patterning that seems to be the most difficult.

Working in Edinburgh and London, the researchers recorded roughly the same number of locally born and Polish-born teenagers speaking both formally  – reading out a written passage ­ – and more informally, in conversation with a friend and a researcher. The Polish teenagers had been living in the UK between seven months and five years, and had little exposure to English while in Poland.  

The Polish teenagers had acquired only a few of the local native speakers’ patterns of variation.  For example, in London, locally-born teenagers were more likely to pronounce –ing as ‘in’ after a previous /k/ or /g/; so they said, for example, I’ve been cookin’ more often than I’ve been eatin’. The Polish teenagers in London did the same.

However, other patterns seemed more difficult to acquire. Unlike native speakers elsewhere in the world, for some reason teenagers in Edinburgh and London do not use the ‘ing’ pronunciation more often in verbs than nouns. However, the Polish teenagers do. Meyerhoff and Schleef suggest that perhaps they are influenced by a wider range of English speakers than their locally born school friends (TV may be important, for instance); perhaps, too, language learners need more time to learn the complex patterns of language variation they hear from the native speakers around them before they can start to use the variation themselves in their everyday speech.

Surprisingly, the Polish learners did not use ‘in’ more often in informal conversation than when reading aloud, though the locally born teenagers did so, in both London and Edinburgh. The Polish learners also behaved differently when it came to the gender pattern of variation. In London, the pattern was the other way round to the expected, local one. London-born boys used ‘in’ more frequently than the girls, as expected, but for the Polish-born boys in London it was the ‘ing’ pronunciation that was more frequent. In Edinburgh, the social factor that affected the pronunciation the most for the Polish teenagers was not gender but the type of friendship network.

Why should there be a difference in social patterns of variation between the language learners and the native speakers? Meyerhoff and Schleef stress that the Polish teenagers are competent speakers of English, even if they are not yet fully proficient. Part of their language competence, they suggest, must involve recognising that native speakers vary their pronunciation of –ing and that this variation is used to mark social information. They are not yet proficient enough in English to recognise exactly how the native speakers do this, so instead they make sense of the variation by using it to mark social categories that for this age group attract a high degree of attention: gender and friendship networks.   

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Meyerhoff, Miriam and Schleef, Erik (2012) Variation, contact and social indexicality in the acquisition of (ing) by teenage migrants. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16: 398-416.

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2012.00535.x

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

Using metaphors to ‘bring it home’

How do you react to charity appeals?

In an earlier summary (Tay 2011: http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/you-know-its-like-bomb-squad-right.html), we looked at how we can use metaphors to explain and deal with abstract concepts during therapy.  Taking another emotive context, Lynne Cameron and Irene Bruna Seu analysed how a focus group of 5 British women used metaphors to discuss the impact of charity appeals. 

The women, who all lived in London and were aged between 32 and 52, were presented with 3 visual and textual prompts (2 from Amnesty International and one article from the British newspaper The Guardian).  These all related to what they term the suffering Other, and provided information outlining cases of torture and abuse in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.  The idea of the suffering Other was used by Cameron and Seu to identify a being that is distinct from a person’s Self and someone with whom we may wish to empathise.  The analysis looked at how members of the focus group reacted to the suffering Other and what justifications they used for rejecting charitable appeals.

In order to conduct the analysis of metaphor use, they identified what they called metaphor vehicles.  For example, in the phrase “it’s a pressurised world”, pressurised is identified as a metaphor vehicle as, even though in context it means that life is busy and stressful, it has another meaning relating to actual physical pressure or force.  Once these metaphor vehicles were identified, they were grouped to reflect their basic meanings – for example, pressurised can be grouped with rammed (e.g. “rammed down your throat”) so as to reflect a wider group of Physical Force Vehicles. 

The results of the analysis highlighted how more than half of the metaphors used by the focus group (295 out of 538) related to spatiality. In other words, vehicle terms grouped as, for example, Location and Distance were used frequently (e.g. “it’s easy to think ‘oh, that’s over there’ ”).  It seemed that assessments of closeness or distance were frequently used as justifications for not wanting to respond to charity appeals.  Cameron and Seu noted how metaphors relating to House and Home were also prominent (e.g. “it’s brought home to you”, “I’d rather change something closer to home”) and when this personal domain was seen to be under threat, negative and physically aggressive metaphors were often used to describe reactions and emotions (e.g. “I don’t think it should be shoved down their throats”).

However, the analysis of the focus group discourse highlighted how empathy may be generated when the participants could identify directly with distant situations (for example, one woman had done voluntary work in Africa), and when close-up experiences (such as a beggar asking for money in the street) were deemed as non-threatening (a beggar sitting down was considered less threatening than a beggar directly approaching you).  As a result, they conclude that there is an optimal ‘distance’ for people to feel empathy and that the more threatening an appeal is to a person’s Self, the more in control they need to feel in order for empathy to be activated.

In conclusion, Cameron and Seu suggest that, by analysing and evaluating how people express their empathy or justifications for lack of empathy, charitable organisations can develop optimal ways of enhancing and promoting empathetic feelings towards the suffering Other.

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Cameron, L. and Seu, I. B. (2012) Landscapes of Empathy: Spatial scenarios, metaphors and metonyms in responses to distant suffering. Text and Talk 32: 281-305.

doi: 10.1515/text-2012-0014

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Welsh and English in Wales

No excuses for not paying!

Language policy and planning initiatives devoted to the revival of the use of Welsh in Wales appear to have been successful in halting the decline of the language. In fact, census data in 2001 showed that the use of the Welsh language among speakers had increased by an impressive 1.8% in the previous decade. Coinciding with this increase has been an increase in the public visibility of Welsh and English bilingualism, for example in road signs and public notices and on more personal items such as T-shirts. Is this increased visibility of bilingualism simply an index of the revival efforts? Researcher Nik Coupland says that ‘this is too sparse an account’ and argues that there is a wide range of social forces that impact on language display in Wales.

Coupland has looked at a range of images that are currently on display in Wales and suggests that they can be ‘framed’ in five different ways. The first two are indicative of the way that visible bilingualism in Welsh has been institutionally promoted in Wales. The other three frames tend to reflect the context in which Welsh is being used and, to an extent, the attitudes of those displaying the images.

Nonautonomous Welsh refers to the display of Welsh throughout most of the 20^th Century, when Welsh was either considered to be inappropriate for use as a public code or it was heavily anglicized, particularly along the Welsh/English border. Examples are street names, which clearly draw on Welsh but which use English orthography followed by the English word street or road e.g. Danycoed Road. In this frame, then, Welsh can be seen to be ‘delegitimized and publicly subordinated to English’.

Parallel-text bilingualism describes the dominant pattern of bilingual signage over the last two decades and which promotes Welsh and English as being on an equal footing, as in the car park image above. In this case the sign has Welsh first, common in areas where there is a high proportion of bilingual speakers, but in areas where there are fewer bilingual speakers the signs are often English first. It is noteworthy, though, that an equal amount of visual space is given to both languages. These parallel-text displays reflect the current language policy of Wales.

The third frame is what Coupland calls The frame of National Resistance and links to images which are displays of language activism in Wales and tend to promote the idea that Welsh is under threat, primarily from English. One example given is a caravan parked in a field with the slogan ‘SPEAK OUR LANGUAGE!’ painted on its side, which clearly speaks to potential English-speaking incomers to the area. These activist images are perhaps seen more in northwest Wales in the denser Welsh-speaking areas. 

The fourth frame, Welsh exoticism, looks at images which promote Welsh as what Coupland calls a ‘consumable cultural curiosity’ and which are generally embedded within the promotion of Welsh in the tourist industry. The most obvious example is the name of the town Llanfairpwllgwyngychgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch  which is displayed, along with a syllable-by syllable guide to its pronunciation, at the town’s railway station. The town is conventionally known as LlanfairPG or Llanfairpwll but here the sign promotes Welsh as being exotic, a language that cannot be pronounced without assistance.

In the final frame of Laconic Metacultural Celebration Coupland looks at the way that language display can be a ‘personalized and personalizing practice’. He discusses the way that a small commercial company in north Wales projects Welsh language and culture onto T-shirt and sweatshirt images. One example, for instance, promotes the historic value of Welsh by parodying a well-known beer-advertising slogan: the T-shirt text reads Cymraeg (meaning Welsh) with the subscript Probably the oldest living language in Europe. Other texts allude to Welsh historical events or cultural phenomena; the use of 62 on a T-shirt for instance is a reference to an important year, 1962, in the revitalization of Welsh and the year that the Welsh Language Society was formed. The slogans invite the reader to puzzle over and work out the references for themselves but, as Coupland points out, they are all celebratory.

Coupland concludes by highlighting that institutions are not the only agents in the process of imprinting language ideologies on public spaces; individuals and small companies can also contribute to the linguistic landscape. The different frames of language display show that ‘there are competing ways of visualizing what “being bilingual” actually means’.

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Coupland, Nikolas. (2012). Bilingualism on Display: The framing of Welsh and English in Welsh public spaces. Language in Society 41, 1-27.

doi: 10.1017/S0047404511000893

This summary was written by Sue Fox

Staying, or goin’?

or, perhaps, goingk?

Why do English speakers all over the world pronounce words ending in –ing sometimes as stayin’, with a final [n], and at other times as staying, with a final [ŋ] ?

Researchers have uncovered a range of factors that influence speakers to choose one of these pronunciations rather than the other. All speakers seem to be affected by the style of speech (informal speech favours stayin’) and by whether the word is a noun, like ceiling, or a verb, like going in I’m going home (verbs favour the ‘in’ pronunciation). The type of consonant that comes before –ing also affects the pronunciation: for example, a previous [n] makes the ‘in’ pronunciation less likely, so that I was stayin' is heard more often than I was runnin’. Social factors are relevant, too – on balance, male speakers the world over favour ‘in’ more than female speakers do. Now Rob Drummond has added another factor to the list by discovering that identity may also influence the pronunciation of –ing, at least for Polish learners of English living in the UK.  

Drummond recorded conversations with 40 Polish adults (aged between 18 and 40) living in Manchester, a traditionally industrial city in North West England. All the Polish speakers had grown up in Poland and all had acquired at least a basic proficiency in English before coming to live in the Manchester area. Drummond analysed the pronunciation of 1677 –ing forms from these conversations – an average of about 42 from each speaker.

The standard ‘ing’ pronunciation was by far the most frequent variant, with seven of the 40 speakers using only this form. Other speakers, though, varied between saying ‘in’ and ‘ing’, just as native speakers of English do. Even more interestingly, the pronunciation of these sixteen speakers was influenced by the same linguistic factors that affect the English of native speakers. So, the Poles favoured the ‘in’ pronunciation when –ing was part of a verb, and they favoured the ‘ing’ pronunciation in words like running or sitting, where there was a previous ‘n’ or similar type of consonant. This is an interesting finding since it shows that as learners become more proficient in English, they acquire the same linguistic patterns of variation as native speakers.

Unlike speakers in previous studies, though, the female Polish speakers used the ‘in’ pronunciation more often than ‘ing’, overall. Drummond suggests that this is due to the type of work that the male and female speakers tended to do, which resulted in differing amounts of contact with native English speakers. For example, one Polish speaker with a high use of the ‘in’ pronunciation worked in a café in Manchester, while another was a manager in a department store. Both these speakers were female. By contrast, a person working as a security guard had a low frequency of the ‘in’ pronunciation, as did a person working in a warehouse. Both these speakers were male, and neither of them came into contact with many English people during the course of their working day.

The most surprising result, though, was that the future plans of the Polish people also affected their pronunciation. Those speakers who were planning to return to Poland in the near future were less likely to say ‘in’ and more likely to say ‘ing’. They were also more likely to use a pronunciation not used by native speakers in Manchester, ‘ingk’ – where words like going or staying are pronounced  ‘goingk’ and ‘stayingk’. This corresponds to the way that ‘ing’ would be pronounced in Polish. In the Polish language, in fact, ‘ng’ only ever occurs before a ‘k’ or a ‘g’.

Drummond suggests that these patterns of variation could be seen as reflecting the speaker’s identity. Of course, there are many different aspects to a person’s identity, and future plans can signal only one part of an identity. Nevertheless, a future plan that involves deciding to stay in a country automatically gives an individual the label (and, presumably, identity) of ‘immigrant’. With this in mind, Drummond argues that the use of one pronunciation rather than another, whether conscious or unconscious (and most likely a combination of the two) can signal allegiance to one or other culture.

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Drummond, Rob (2012) Aspects of identity in a second language: ING variation in the speech of Polish migrants living in Manchester, UK.  Language Variation and Change 24: 107-133.

doi10.1017/S0954394512000026

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

You know, it’s like the bomb squad, right?

Metaphors can help us to explain ideas and feelings which are difficult to express.  This is particularly true in settings and contexts which are, by their very nature, emotive – such as therapy sessions between a patient and an analyst.

Dennis Tay, who analysed transcripts of conversation between therapists and patients, noted that metaphors (a term which for him includes similes) are often accompanied in our speech by *discourse markers* which signal their occurrence.  For example, like compares a situation with the subject of the metaphor, such as the cake in that cake is so luscious, it’s like eating velvet, while phrases such as sort of help soften the comparison being made, e.g. he gave me so many flowers, it was sort of like living in a florist’s.

In analysing the data, Tay identified metaphors by comparing their meaning in the context with their literal meaning and establishing the mismatch between the two.  On the whole, he found that therapists used metaphoric expressions to help define abstract concepts in more concrete terms (such as relating one patient’s problem of panic under pressure to that of bomb squad personnel faced with the decision of ‘which wire to cut’).  In contrast, patients tended to use metaphors when they were expressing and explaining thoughts, memories and emotions (for example, when a patient describes his personality as lacking a ‘light and fluffy mode’ and saying that instead he is more like ‘heavy cotton’). 

Building on this, Tay looked at how discourse markers such as you know, right and I mean signal how people use metaphors as they develop their discourse.  He noted that, while I mean (which signals some kind of self-adjustment or correction) was used less often by therapists (perhaps due to their greater self-assurance in speaking), in general discourse markers help when the expression of a concept is difficult, and can invite the other person to make inferences of their own, e.g. my life’s like some sort of Russian novel, you know?.

Taking the analysis of metaphor use and the placement of discourse markers together, Tay observed that many discourse markers were used to signal ‘key’ moments in the therapy discourse structure, such as the beginning of a metaphor and the continual linking of extended metaphors during speech.  Further research on these ‘junctions’ and how they are signalled (whether through discourse markers or other linguistic features), Tay suggested, will help therapists develop more effective strategies for patient communication.  In doing this, Tay added, metaphor research will become more applicable to real world concerns.

*discourse markers (which are sometimes termed ‘discourse-pragmatic particles’) are explained in a previous post (http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.fr/2012/04/discourse-pragmatic-markers-take-centre.html)

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Tay, Dennis (2011) Discourse Markers as Metaphor Signalling Devices and Psychotherapeutic Talk. Language and Communication 31: 310-317

doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2011.02.001

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

Mars and Venus?

Do you think that men are from Mars and women from Venus? Whether we do or not, recent research shows how the way we talk about men and women in everyday life keeps the gender division alive in our culture.

Elizabeth Stokoe analysed British talk data from a wide range of settings, including conversations during a date, radio broadcasts, helpline interactions and online texts. She focused first on replies to questions where speakers explicitly mentioned categories such as ‘guy’, ‘girl’, ‘woman’ or ‘man’. She noted the category that was used and then analysed what was said before and after the mention of the category. Over and over again she found that people first gave a description of a type of behaviour, then followed this with mention of the general category. So, in the first box, taken from an online forum for topics including ‘fashion, beauty, love and sex’, the first poster describes a problem in the texting behaviour of her current boyfriend. The second poster then proposes an account of the boyfriend’s actions in terms of a generalised category (you know what men are like). Together the two people posting have mentioned a range of activities that the second poster proposes as typical of the category of ‘men’. Her you know in you know what men are like proposes these activities as shared common knowledge. The three features description, categorization, and ‘present as common knowledge’ occurred in all the extracts she analysed.

Posted: Jan 07, 2007  09:40:17 PM

Subject: To text, call or not??

Hi all, If you were texting someone and he has suddenly gone all cold on you: giving one word answers, no kisses in texts as before, would you (a) text him and ask “if you’d rather I didn’t text any more, please let me know” (b) leave it alone – and just see if he comes around (c) get the message……

Posted: Jan 08, 2007  12:13:18 PM

Subject: To text, call or not??

I would just wait for him to cool down and contact you. If he doesn’t call or text, then I would write this one off. You know what men are like: if they don’t want to see you anymore, then they cut off all contact!

These same three features also occurred in everyday stories. For example, in the second box speaker F is talking to a man on a speed date encounter. She has been describing herself as a ‘big tennis fan’ who also plays a lot of tennis. She formulates two phrases that use gender categories to characterise her engagement with the game. First, she ties the activity of being ‘addicted to golf’ to a lot of men. Second, she formulates what she presents as a typical woman’s reaction to her partner’s addiction (“ooh I’m a golfing widow”). By using you know, she proposes that M shares the common knowledge about how women typically react when men’s extreme sporting activities lead to their wives being left alone. Here, though, F locates herself within the same category as men who are addicted to sport, swapping golf for tennis and warning that her partner may be left as a tennis widow in her own relationships – in other words, she is not a typical woman in this regard.

1 F: like a lot of men… are addicted to golf

2 M: yeah

3 F: and you know how women say “ooh I’m a golfing widow”

4 M: yeah <laughs>

5 F: well I’m a  bit like that when it comes to playing tennis

By analysing examples of this kind Stokoe reveals ‘what counts’ as gendered behaviour in our culture. The activities and behaviour that get tied to gender categories such as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ include, for men, making the first move in a relationship, being casual in relationships, being reluctant to go to the doctor and being addicted to sport. Women, on the other hand, typically nag and wind men up, and are not typically addicted to sport. By presenting these descriptions tied to categories as common knowledge, differences between men and women are presented as taken for granted, and legitimised.  The common knowledge part of the sequence is often delivered with a laugh or a smiley tone of voice, allowing the speaker to present the description as clearly recognizable cultural knowledge.

Of course, interlocutors can, and sometimes do, dispute the descriptions. Nevertheless the fact that data from a range of very different settings all contain the same three part combination shows how we construct our social world through language and, in this case, keep alive the idea that men and women belong in distinct cultural and social categories.

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Stokoe, Elizabeth (2012) ‘You know how men are’: Description, categorization and common knowledge in the anatomy of a categorial practice. Gender and Language 6: 233-255.

doi. 10.1558/genl.v6i1.233

This summary was written by Jenny Cheshire

The discourse of climate change

Something must be done? or We must do something?

It is government policy makers who have the most power to solve the problem of climate change, so the reports they receive about our current scientific knowledge of climate change are all-important.  Kjersti Fløttum and Trine Dahl argue that the language used in advisory reports can differ in ways that have not been recognised so far, and that these differences are important as they could influence the decisions that policy makers take.

Fløttum and Dahl analysed the language used in two recent influential reports. One was from the World Bank: the World Development Report, 2010  (WDR). The focus of this report is on economic growth, the economic impact of climate change and how to aid communities affected by climate change. The other report was from the United Nations Development Programme: the Human Development Report, 2007-2008  (HDR). In this case the focus was on human rights and the effects of climate change on people’s way of life.

The analysis focussed on the overview sections of the reports, where scientific evidence is presented and suggestions made for government policy. The researchers found that even though the writers were reporting on the same subject matter, the language used in the overviews represented different ‘voices’ and therefore told different stories.

For example, the WDR report used more directives (e.g. action must be taken; swift action is needed), which resulted in a more commanding and action-oriented tone.  The writers of the report also used can with a high frequency, mainly with the meaning of ‘being able to’ (e.g. high income countries can and must reduce their carbon footprints). This also gave an action-oriented emphasis to the report.

In contrast, the HDR overview featured a much greater use of we and our (for example, the risks could be greater than we understand). It was not always clear whether we referred to the whole of humanity, to unspecified experts, or to the authors, but using this pronoun gave a more inclusive feel to the text that helped to engage the reader. And whereas the WDR report brought in scientific ‘voices’ (e.g. economists continue to disagree on the economically or socially optimal carbon trajectory), the HDR overview brought in the voices of well-known and respected individuals. It referred, for instance, to Martin Luther King’s words we are faced now with the fact that tomorrow is today, pointing out that these words still have a powerful resonance.

Fløttum and Dahl conclude that it may not be surprising that the reports of the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme differ, given the differences between the two institutions. Nevertheless it is important, they argue, to understand how the use and manipulation of linguistic features helps to create different stories about the same topic, as this can help unveil the complexity of the discourse on climate change.

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Fløttum, K. and Dahl, T. (2012) Different contexts, different ‘stories’? A linguistic comparison of two development reports on climate change. Language and Communication 32:14-23.

doi: 10.1016/j.langcom.2011.11.002

This summary was written by Jenny Amos

'AND' can signal that it's our turn to speak

and ............ go!

In sentences, words like and and but link ideas and clauses together. However, in conversation, they may be used in other ways.  For example, compare the two uses of but in the speech of A below:

1)            B: what did you do today

               A:  we went to the zoo but we didn’t get to see the hippos

               B:  Oh, that’s a shame

2)            B:  have you spoken to each other since?

               A: not really. I know part of it is me being sensitive but

               B: that’s why I asked because I was worried about you

In the first example, the but is being used to join the two parts we went to the zoo and we didn’t get to see hippos.  It occurs in the middle of the utterance, with no break in production, and so does not signal to B that they can start talking.  In (2), the but in A’s utterance is produced after a completed thought, ‘I know it’s me being sensitive’.  However, in this case, speaker B begins speaking and takes their turn in the conversation.  So, what is the difference between these two but’s?  How does speaker B know that they can start talking in example (2), but not in example (1)?

These are some of the questions that Gareth Walker wanted to investigate when looking at what he calls, transitional ‘Trail-off’ conjunctions.  These are conjunctions (such as and and but) which are used after a completed thought and signal to others in the conversation that the speaker has finished, thus allowing the transition from one speaker to another.

After analysing 5 face-to-face interactions between US English speakers, he identified 28 of these transitional trail-off conjunctions. In analysing them, he found that they had certain phonetic and visual characteristics in common.  For example, the conjunctions tended to be produced at a lower loudness level than what preceded them, together with a wide fall in pitch.  Walker notes that these are both characteristics which are common in turn-final speech, indicating the end of a speaker’s turn.  Therefore, it is not wholly surprising that the conjunctions share these attributes.  In comparison, conjunctions which are produced as part of the on-going utterance (such as in (1)) are spoken with less of a pitch drop and are still quite loud in relation to the surrounding speech.

Walker also analysed the phonetic features alongside visual data, obtained during camera recordings of the interactions. He notes that although the phonetic shape of the conjunctions is the most important factor in determining its function, visual factors are also relevant.  The two most striking correlations with transitional trail-off conjunctions were the direction of gaze and hand movement.  He notes that, in 9 out of the 28 examples, the speaker sweeps their gaze across the other participants, as if surveying for the next speaker in the conversation.  With respect to gestures, he notes that with transitional trail-off conjunctions, any gestures made with the hands are completed at the time when the conjunction is uttered (indicating that the design of the gesture is constructed to fit the total utterance).  In contrast, those conjunctions which do not signal the end of a turn are accompanied by gestures which continue after the conjunction has been uttered (another indication to the audience that the speaker isn’t finished yet).

In conclusion, Walker suggests that more research needs to be done which ties both phonetic and visual approaches together.  In this way, he says, we can get a better idea of how both these factors work together in the organisation of interaction (in this case, with respect to the management of turn-taking in conversation).

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Walker, G. (2012) Coordination and interpretation of vocal and visible resources: ‘Trail-off’ conjunctions. Language and Speech 55:141-163.

doi: 10.1177/0023830911428858

This summary was written by Jenny Amos