A successor to Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996, this volume contains a similar collection of papers at the interface between phonetics and conversational interaction. There is a lengthy introductory essay by the editors, followed by 12 chapters grouped into three broad sections: “Turn-taking,” “Projecting and expanding turns,” and “Connecting across turns.” Each chapter has a separate bibliography, and the volume has a general index. Seven of the contributions describe British or American English, while a further five address the features of German, Finnish, and Japanese. All the contributions represent work carried out strictly within the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), an approach that lends itself well to the study of turn-taking.

In the first section of the book, Ogden considers a hitherto rather neglected parameter of prosody, voice quality, and its function in Finnish conversation as a cue to end of turn. This chapter offers the reader a good overview of the literature on voice quality. The closely analyzed data samples are complemented by some useful quantitative information on the extent to which the features occurred overall. Tanaka's chapter on the signaling of turn finality in Japanese is an interesting contribution and is extremely well contextualized in terms of the related literature. A refreshingly large part of the chapter is devoted to a discussion of findings rather than being restricted to presentation of data. The chapter by Szczepek Reed rightly challenges the narrow view of turn-final intonation in English and shows that, under certain circumstances, contours other than “low falls” (by which she means low terminals) can correlate with turn finality. While the cases described here are justifiably described as turn-final, they are all well documented in the intonation literature: The phenomenon of a nuclear fall followed by a low rise (see, e.g., Cruttenden 1986) is a common realization of a final adverbial or an item of “given” or “shared” information that is not completely deaccented. A high fall is also known as a “finality signal” (e.g., Wichmann 2000). The musical intervals observed in the data are examples of stylized intonation, already known to be used, for example, in telephone openings and closings. This chapter is an example of the limitations of the CA approach when it ignores all previous work that was not carried out within the CA framework. The final chapter in this section, by Wells & Corrin, is a developmental study of overlap in adult–child interaction, showing that “adult” overlap is a strategy that has to be learned. The authors challenge earlier work that associates intonation patterns with rather rigid a priori speech act categories of “request” or “statement.” They demonstrate with their analysis how to engage with existing accounts and show how, in this case, the interactional approach of CA can lend subtlety and insight.

The second section begins with an excellent essay by Walker, who examines prosodic features that mark a stretch of speech as not new but a continuation of prior talk. This chapter is based on expert phonetic analysis, encompassing a range of prosodic and segmental features, and is informatively illustrated with amplitude traces, waveforms, and spectrograms, together with simple interlinear pitch traces. It also provides some useful distributional information about the data. Auer & Rönfeldt's contribution examines a fascinating aspect of aphasic talk, identifying the “prolixity” ascribed to aphasics as the result of strategies to cover up word-finding difficulties. The chapter is somewhat circuitously organized, and some editorial tightening of the structure would have made it easier to read. This is also true of the next chapter, by Selting, who describes the interactional function of an intonation pattern said to be typical of Berlin German. The pattern is described in terms reminiscent of early holistic descriptions of English intonation and is referred to variously in the chapter as an “upstairs staircase” and an “upward staircase,” although since the “staircase” seems to consist of only one step, the term “step up” might have been simpler. The shortcomings of this chapter lie first of all in its diffuse structure, and second in the failure to contextualize the intonation contour in terms of previous literature. The “step up” is remarkably like the well-known “stylized intonation” in English, and common as list intonation even in other varieties of German. The author suggests tentatively that it may be “a kind of transfer or extension of the list contour” and may convey “recurrentness, routineness.” This is tantalizingly close to what has been said about level contours for some time, and reference to existing literature might have allowed more interesting and more universal claims than were possible here. The final chapter in this section, by Ford, Fox, & Hellermann, considers the prosodic differences between stand-alone no tokens and those that initiate a longer turn. The data are limited to 10 tokens, but some of the interactional observations are interesting: Longer turns are taken by the main teller, while short answers are usually given by the speaker not involved in the main telling. The prosodic observations are less interesting in that they are highly predictable: Longer turns are projected prosodically, whether or not they begin with no. The chapter is repetitive and fails to situate the prosodic observations within the wider context of prosody research.

Section 3 contains some excellent chapters. Curl demonstrates, as did Wells and Corrin (above), the value of a CA approach in identifying interactional reasons for otherwise puzzling facts, such as the contradictory findings in the literature on the prosodic behavior of “repetitions.” Curl engages with the existing literature, and her findings deserve to be taken into account in any further work, whatever the theoretical framework. She also engages interestingly with the debate about the linguistic/paralinguistic distinction, and while I remain to be convinced, it is refreshing to read an essay that steps back from the data to consider some theoretical implications of the findings and leaves the reader wanting to discuss them. The chapter by Ogden, Hakulinen, & Tainio finds that in Finnish a stylized intonation is associated with routine or predictability, as Selting finds for Berlin German. The study is set against a good overview of previous accounts of stylization. Of course, the place of such intonation in an intonational phonology is controversial, and Ogden and colleagues predictably disagree with more generative views, but this is more indicative of a fundamental difference in stance regarding the nature of language than of a specific view of intonation. Couper-Kuhlen's contribution deals with another well-documented prosodic feature – the resetting of pitch to indicate a new topic or discourse sequence. The contribution that it makes is to show how this prosodic feature relates systematically to other linguistic or nonlinguistic indicators of continuation or shift, giving us a more holistic view and some sequential evidence for what has been documented mainly on the basis of other kinds of speech data. The final chapter is by Local, who refines his own previous work on continuing and restarting by using Jefferson's more subtle distinction between continuation and resumption, looking at utterances beginning with and um. This is an excellent example of how the two areas of expertise – CA and phonetics – can be mutually beneficial in the right hands. Local's phonetic analyses are exemplary, but in the end we are left with a very large “bundle” of features and very little hope of generalizing from them. Now that this “continuation work” has been identified, it would be interesting to know if other examples, not beginning with and um, share any features (independent of the segmental material) with the data described here. This would be a way of moving forward beyond the case studies.

All in all, this is an uneven collection. The contributions vary considerably in the quality of writing: Some are well structured and concise, others less so. At its best, this volume shows how the coming together of disciplines can enrich our knowledge of human speech, and the best chapters are those that demonstrate real proficiency in phonetic analysis and combine meticulous analysis with distributional and other quantitative information. It is also valuable when authors step back from what can otherwise be a sequence of case studies, incidentally a little tedious to read, and consider some of the wider implications of their findings. There are encouraging signs that the transcription conventions held so dear by many Conversation Analysts are gradually being superseded by plainer versions. Jefferson's conventions are stoutly defended in the introduction, and it is true that they have had significant consequences, but the nonsensical spellings often replicate perfectly standard pronunciation; I can, for example, discern no difference between the pronunciation of tell you and tellyu. Such examples are still to be found here, but mainly where old material has been reused, in which case it is sensible to do as Couper-Kuhlen has done and at least standardize spellings in the running text. Finally, laudable though Jefferson's aim may have been to capture as much detail as possible, such transcriptions mislead the user into treating them as primary data, and they have now in any case been overtaken by easily accessible instrumental analysis.

The excellent introduction to this volume more than compensates for the unevenness in the individual contributions. In it, the editors note the difficulties in generalizing from results, and yet they themselves manage to achieve more in this respect than have some of their contributors. The editors rightly emphasize the importance of interdisciplinarity and point to the value of linguistic knowledge to augment CA analyses (always provided, in their view, that one remains cautious of a priori categories). Although some contributors seem to ignore them altogether, a priori categories are rightfully seen by the editors as at least “suggestive starting points.” Some of the work presented here confirms existing views, although not always acknowledged, while other contributors show how CA has the power to make sense of hitherto conflicting observations. However, the results of a long tradition of work on speech prosody in other frameworks are not valueless. Just as experimental phonologists can miss important factors when they ignore what people really do when they talk, so too Conversation Analysts can miss useful insights if they refuse to engage with work outside their own theoretical framework.

Criticisms aside, the significant contribution of this volume is to reinforce the message that the analysis of spoken interaction cannot focus on what is said to the exclusion of how it is said. What Jefferson pioneered has now been taken up by those who focus on phonetics, showing that the sounds of speech are inextricably involved in the making of meaning. The results of work carried out in the CA framework bear an important message for all those engaged in phonetics and prosody but working within different frameworks and with different goals – whether within experimental phonology or the automatic analysis of large speech corpora – and for speech technologists hoping to replicate human interaction. In particular, the notion that the meaning of an utterance lies within the utterance itself has to be challenged. The significance of sequential information – the meaning generated by the prosodic relationship of one turn to another rather than by anything inherent in an individual utterance – has largely been ignored in experimental work, and it is now clear, as Walker in this volume shows, that this is too limiting a view.