Zur kommunikativen Rolle reduzierter Lautstärke in Konferenzvorträgen
On the Communicative Role of Reduced Loudness in Conference Presentations

Summary/Abstract: This paper aims to investigate the communicative role of reduced loudness in conference presentations based on auditory perception from a conversation analytic perspective. The subject of the study are five linguistic expert lectures recorded at international conferences in Germany within the framework of the GeWiss project. The focus of the investigation is on those passages that are pronounced much more quietly in contrast to the immediate (left and right) context. The auditory analysis is followed by the acoustic measurements performed with Praat, which exemplifies the intensity course with the graphs. The analysis is done within the framework of interactional linguistics. This means that the empirical data are interpreted in a specific (speech)situational context. From the analysis, it appears that the reduced loudness fulfills an important communicative function in the design of the scientific lectures, which is to signal the less relevance in the (con)textual information hierarchy. It was observed that the speakers pronounce certain contents (comments on the speech situation, additions added as supplement or extension to what is said, remarks on the research background, and meta-commentaries) more quietly to mark them prosodically as secondary and thus to weaken their effect. In this context, the reduced loudness proves to be an anti-emphasis, allowing the speakers to divert the listeners’ attention from the less important or non-pertinent information in the scientific presentations.

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