ones are relatively underdeveloped, and that once those are properly developed, language
‘proper’ can get down to business. We maintain, rather, that the full range of aspects of
utterance-activity remain in play in all live human interaction.18 By way of illustration we
take a single example from an episode involving several interacting adults.
The episode (for more detail see Cowley 1998) occurred in Italy, and involved a mother,
a father and their adult daughter. In this case, everything begins with Rosa, the mother,
evidently seeking sympathy by claiming to Monica, her (adult) daughter, that a ‘certain
person’ had been too lazy to cut some pea-poles she had wanted. This tactic does not
Figure 1: Oeu!
Rosa: non ... piu
Aldo: oeu
Monica: oeu . ha!
succeed in winning Monica’s sympathy, and in any event it soon emerges that the
husband/father, Aldo, had in fact cut fifteen poles. Rosa changes tack, and instead asserts
that the problem is that the pea-poles were unsatisfactory, because they were too long.
Still seeking Monica’s sympathy, Rosa now ridicules Aldo by claiming that the pea-poles
were ‘even longer than this room, if not longer’ (‘son piu lunghe di questa camera se non
piu’). At this point words fail Aldo, and he uses a response cry (Goffman, 1981) not
identifiable with any word, but amenable to being glossed as ‘come on, you must be
joking’, and in the context is clearly legible as an action of gentle mocking. The vocal
gesture in this case is a simple vowel (‘Oeu’) the duration of which can be stretched to
that of a short sentence. What is most striking, though, is not the internal prosodic
properties of Aldo’s ‘Oeu’ but its relational properties in the context of the interaction,
and the shared history of the three people present. To see these features, consider the
following figure:
Notice that Aldo’s ‘oeu’ begins in between Rosa’s ‘non’ and ‘piu’ (‘not’ and ‘longer’),
and so follows her assertion that the poles were as long as the room, rather than waiting
for the ‘end’ of her utterance where she adds ‘if not longer’. This violates standard
notions of turn-taking while being in keeping with analogies with either dance or boxing.
The beginning of Aldo’s vocalisation is at an unusually high pitch for him (about an
octave above his usual range), and as he stretches the sound out, he raises his pitch to the
same level as the end of Rosa’s ‘piu’, indexing her utterance. A little less than half way
through Aldo’s ‘oeu’ Monica joins in with an ‘oeu’ of her own, starting with her pitch a
little higher than Aldo’ s, but joining his in harmony and continuing after he has stopped.
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