Analysing correlations between generic patterns and prosodic realizations in interviews in English

Genres are constituted by stages that fulfil different functions within the whole text and each stage has particular realizations at the lexico-grammatical and semantic strata in relation to that function. Genre studies describe these patterns with little or no reference to their realization at the level of phonology. On the other hand, phonological studies rarely refer to communicative functions in terms of linguistic genres. There are studies that refer to different choices in tonality and tonicity which affect stretches of discourse larger than the tone unit. Some of these studies relate intonation choices to the textual structure positing the notion of paratone. The aim of this paper is to enquire whether it is possible to find correlations between phonological realizations and specific generic functions in different stages of the discourse. It explores the relationship between prosodic and generic configurations in general interest interviews from a BBC programme. The corpus is analysed showing generic configurations and both auditory and instrumental analysis are used for the phonological study. The preliminary conclusions reached show that intonation choices tend to have a role in signalling textual and interpersonal meanings within generic structures together with, and independently from, lexico-grammatical choices.