‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’…, you know?

Abstract

This article describes the prosodic features of the most frequent pragmatic markers in English conversations that contribute to the management of context in interaction. Often, turn-taking has been analyzed either from a structural perspective, in which the participants are treated as subjects that pursue rules, accommodating to pre-established patterns, or (more recently) from a pragmatic perspective with a focus on the intentionality of the speaker in the use of pragmatic markers. It is my contention in this article that pragmatic markers are ancillary to context within the Dynamic Model of Meaning theory, and that prosody plays an essential role in adaptive management as the fourth element of context.