People Speaking: 12

The Collector

You and your old antiques! You spend our hard earned
/ˎ juː ənd ʒər ˌəʊld ˌanˌtiːks! ju spend ɑː ˈhɑːd ˈɜːnd   [1]

    money on some ugly old bedpan.
    ˎmʌni | ɒn sʌm ˈʌgli ˈəʊld ˎbedpan./  [2]

     Warming pan, dear.
/ ˋwɔːmɪŋ pan, ˏdɪə./  [3]

  Never mind.  You must be going crazy. After all
/ˌnevə ˏˌmaɪnd. ju ˏmʌs bi gəʊɪŋ ˋkreɪzɪ. ˈɑːftər ˈɔːl   [4]

it cost us to have central heating put in, too.
ɪt ˎkɒst əs tə hav ˈsentrl ˋhiːtɪŋ pʊt ˎɪn, ˋˏtuː/.  [5]

But look, darling! Do be reasonable.
/ bət ˋ-lʊk, ˏdɑːlɪŋ!  ˋ-duː bi ˏriːznəbl.   [6]

It's dated sixteen eighteen, you can see.
ɪts ˈdeɪtɪd ˋ-sɪkstiːn | eɪˋtiːn, ju kn ˋsiː/  [7]

 Sixteen eighteen my foot!   Who cares?
/ˌsɪkstiːn eɪtiːn maɪ ˎfʊt! ˈhuː ˋkeəz?/ [8]

After all, a thing like a genuine Jacobean bed
/ˌɑːftər ˎɔːl, | ə ˎθɪŋ laɪk ə ˎʤenjuɪn ˋ-ʤakəbɪən ˋˏbed/  [9]

warmer is an investment, you must realise.
wɔːmə | ˊɪz ən ɪnˋvesmənt, ju ˌmʌst ˎˏrɪəlaɪz.  [10]

The wife's opening words are spoken on a highly idiomatic prosody. Nominally the only word stressed is “you” which is followed by a long low slightly rising tail. The lower the pitch is maintained in an utterance the more lacking in normal cheerfulness it sounds. She is of course strongly expressing disgruntlement.

His (low) Rise on “dear” is markedly conciliatory.

Notice that “our” as /ɑː/ in line 1 is a weakform that appeared to have not been recognised as such by anyone before my 1965 article Gradation in Conversational English and is not so very gen·rally. LPD has from its first edition recognised that for some speakers /ɑː/ corresponds to a strongform /aʊə/ (which can be [ɑə] etc). It doesn't offer any opinion on which proportion of GB speakers have /ɑː/ all the time and which have the variation. In my opinion the predominant usage is the latter.

On a semantic point, an ancient warming pan was indeed a pan (containing hot coals etc) inserted between bedclothes to heat them but the husband understandably objects to her calling it a bedpan because that term is now exclusively employed in hospitals etc for a quite different purpose.

In line 6 he's being maximally conciliatory/sympathetic by his use of wide pitch ranges and Rise climaxes. In line 8 she is still disgruntled hence her use of a long low (pre)head and low-pitch climax viz a Slump. He's being quite restrained as we see from his use of a Slump-Rise not a Fall-Rise as his final climax tone.