Pausing as a prosodic correlate of speech units in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish) (original) (raw)
Related papers
The cohesive function of prosody in Ékegusií (Kisii) narratives: A functional-typological approach
2016
This thesis aims to advance the idea that prosody is fundamentally about creating cohesion, that is, signaling the “relations of meaning that exist within the text” (Halliday & Hasan 1976:4). Building on research on the cohesive function of prosody by Wichmann (2000) and Wennerstrom (2001), I show how each of the features generally referred to as prosodic are used by speakers to lend cohesion to their discourse by signaling the transitions from one unit of discourse to the next, the relations that hold between those units, and their relative prominence. To accomplish this, I look at six prosodic cues in Ékegusií, a Great Lakes Bantu language of southwestern Kenya with lexical and grammatical tone (Cammenga 2002; Nash 2011). Those cues are pause, vowel elision, prosodic accent, pitch reset, isotony (intonational parallelism), and intonational contour. For each feature, I exemplify the ways in which it demarcates conceptually cohesive units of discourse, and/or signals the relations between one unit of speech and another. I show that when these prosodic cues appear, they create cohesive ties between one segment of discourse and another by signaling where one discourse topic ends and another begins, and indicating how – and how closely – the new discourse topic relates to the old (Couper-Kuhlen 2004; Swerts & Geluykens 1994). Together with morphosyntactic devices for cohesion, such as anaphoric pronouns and reference, the cohesive ties created by prosody are what give coherence to the text, thus distinguishing it from a random assortment of unrelated utterances (Halliday & Hasan 1976). I conclude by discussing how an understanding of prosody as a means for signaling discourse cohesion complements more interactional approaches to prosody (Barth-Weingarten 2013; Barth-Weingarten & Reber 2010; Couper-Kuhlen & Ford 2004), and provides a language-independent means of examining prosody crosslinguistically, thus laying a foundation for future typological studies.
An Analysis of Syntax and Prosody Interactions in a Dolakhā Newar Rendition of The Mahābhārata
Himalayan Linguistics, 2014
This study explores the relationship of prosodic and syntactic structure in a Dolakhā Newār rendering of a portion of The MahΩbhΩrata. Six intonation types are identified and described. The strongest syntax/prosody correlation is between final intonation and finite verb morphology. Finite clauses may be found with continuing intonation; in these cases the speaker manipulates the syntactic and prosodic levels for functional reasons. Prosodic units combine to form larger structures which we call prosodic sentences. These are defined as prosodic marcro-units optionally containing any number of continuing intonation units and ending with final intonation. Prosodic sentences may be internally complex and exhibit embedding. Boundaries between narrative sentences are produced by the convergence of finality at the syntactic and prosodic levels. Body of paper Appendix I. Transcription Conventions and Abbreviations Appendix II. Glossed and translated text, with sound files Appendix III. Annotations Appendix IV. A Folk Retelling of The MahΩbhΩrata References In section 4, correlations between syntactic units and prosodic units are presented, along with a discussion of their implications. We explicitly discuss the notion of "sentence" in section 5. We follow Chafe (1994) in recognizing the existence of prosodic sentences which are independent of syntactic sentences, but have structural parallels. We claim that speakers signal significant boundaries between sentences in narrative primarily by the alignment of final syntax and final intonation. Appendix III contains the transcribed narrative in its entirety, with linguistic glosses and free translation. Additional observations on the interaction between syntax and prosody may be found in the annotations, located in Appendix IV. Previous work on the interaction of prosody and syntax varies both in goals and in method. The current study is inspired by the work of Chafe (1980, 1988, 1993, 1994). It similarly seeks to understand the relationship between prosody and syntax through the detailed and qualitative analysis of naturally occurring discourse. This paper complements two prior studies on intonation in the Kathmandu dialect of Newar, Kansakar (1977) and Hargreaves (1986), which also examine the interaction of intonation with other linguistic subsystems. In particular, Hargreaves (1986) explores many of the issues with which we are concerned. 2. Prosody in DolakhΩe Speech is not pronounced in long, monotonous sequences of phones, but in short "spurts" or "bursts", which have characteristic changes in pitch, tempo and loudness. Units of this type have been given numerous names by different scholars, including "tone groups" (Palmer 1922, O'Connor and Arnold 1973), "intonation groups" (Cruttenden 1986) "tone units" (Knowles 1984), "intonation phrases" (Selkirk 1986) and "intonation units" (Chafe 1988, 1993, Du Bois et al. 1993). Since the terms "tone" and "intonation" both refer to pitch, and since pitch is only one of several factors that differentiate one such unit from the next, we have decided to adopt the more general term prosodic unit. In our transcription, prosodic units are numbered sequentially and placed on separate lines. We follow the general approach of Du Bois et al (1993) in identifying a set of timing and pitch cues which serve to mark the boundaries between prosodic units. Timing cues involve the tempo of speaking, and include pauses, which frequently occur between prosodic units, lengthening, which tends to occur at the ends of prosodic units, and initial anacrusis, which refers to the relative rapidity with which speakers often begin prosodic units. Of the three timing cues, pauses are the most commonly occurring, as 232 of the 362 prosodic units in the text (roughly 64%) have pauses preceding them. 4 Following the transcription system of Du Bois et al. (1993), pauses are indicated in our text with a sequence of dots: Two-dot pauses indicate very short disruptions in fluency, whereas three-dot pauses indicate longer pauses of approximately three-tenths of a second or 4 Pauses may also occur within prosodic units, but this is relatively rare. 9 The transitivity of the clause may be established by the requirement for subjects to be in the ergative case, and by the transitive form of the third-person singular past verb form,-cu.
Marking boundaries: intonation units and prosodic sentences
This paper presents a study of the prosodic correlates at the boundaries of intonation units and prosodic sentences in Jaminjung, a severely endangered language of Northern Australia, including pitch resets, final lengthening, pauses, and phonation events such as breathiness and creakiness. This analysis demonstrates that units of speech larger than IUs must be examined to account for the phenomena observed in spontaneous speech. It contributes to the ongoing debate on the nature and status of discourse units and the best methodologies for their identification (Degand and Simon 2009); it also contributes to the developing interest in examining discourse in spontaneous speech and its theoretical implications (Wichman 2006) from the perspective of an, as yet, unwritten language.
Vansina proposed that the oral forms of the traditional transmission of knowledge should distinguish between form and content on the one hand, and freedom and fixity on the other: the narrative comprising prosodic and lexical improvisation, and the poem, rejecting improvisation. Poem and narrative, according to Jakobson, differ exclusively in the message, leaving Fregian references and Peircean interpretants beyond their scope. To the extent that prosodic and lexical variations do not reach references, the narrative is characterized as a succession of events represented symbolically. In speech, the voice production and the lexical representations establish two systems that integrate into the tonal rhythm: the support of the voice is conditioned by the conditions of the speaker and the lexical distribution derives from the agreement between the expressive needs of the speaker and the possibilities of syntactic construction of the language. In oral narratives, the integration of these systems allows us to associate intonation in speech with musical intonation: authentic finalizations aim at a finalizing descending tone, while plagal finalizations do not seek the same tone, reproducing in speech the same tendency as for the western music.
Direct speech reports and the cline of prosodic integration in Dolakha Newar
Direct speech reporting is a rhetorical strategy used frequently in the production of Dolakha Newar narrative. Direct speech reports are syntactically uniform in constituting center-embedded objects of ditransitive verbs. Prosodically, they show a wide range of behaviors. They may be set off from the surrounding quotative frame by intonation-unit boundaries, variations in pitch or loudness, and/or the production of contours typical of conversational speech. They may also be produced across multiple intonation units and may show patterns of macro-level prosodic structuring indicative of internal prosodic coherence and embedding within higher-level structures. On the other hand, they may exhibit none of these prosodic characteristics and be prosodically integrated with respect to the quotative frame. This variable behavior results from competition among a variety of pressures, including speakers’ performative goals, the syntax of complementation, the rhetorical impact of the quoted speech, performance factors, and inter-speaker variation in style, among others. While statistical analyses might fruitfully be applied to objectively quantifiable factors, a purely statistical model will never fully predict prosodic behavior, due to the meaningful nature of prosody and intangible features of individuals in the production of discourse.