Book Review of, The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analysis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Selected papers from the 2013 Conference on the Prosody-Discourse Interface )
2014
This issue of JoSS contains extended versions of a small selection of papers presented at the Prosody-Discourse Interface conference (Interface Discours-Prosodie, IDP), held in Leuven (Belgium), from 11 to 13 September 2013. This conference is the fifth edition in a series of biannual conferences previously held in Aix-en-Provence (2005), Geneva (2007), Paris (2009), and Salford (2011). The general topic of these conferences is the relation between prosody and discourse. Research focuses on the way in which certain prosodic phenomena interact with discourse events and discourse structure, and vice versa. When examinig the topics covered in these conferences, the following observations can be made:
Prosody: Information Structure, Grammar, Interaction
2018
This special issue of Linguistik Online collects four articles by researchers whose contribution to prosody research has been seminal. The main aims of the issue are to introduce the reader to some leading approaches to prosody and to increase discussion between scholars working within different frameworks. The main focus of the contributing authors’ work has been prosodic aspects of Italian and German, and their articles make particular reference to these languages. However, neither research in English, nor English as an object language, can or should be ignored when working on prosody, as substantial theories on it – and especially on intonation – were first developed for British English and American English. We believe that the four articles all address crucial issues, including the role of prosody in linguistic description and its place in a general theory of language: a brief overview of current trends in research on prosody, and an explanation of how the four contributions rel...
]), attrition of phonetic substance has been recognized as a segmental phenomenon typical of grammaticalization. Research on grammaticalization has connected this process with the loss of prosodic prominence on the way from lexical to grammatical elements, whereby grammaticalized elements tend to be integrated into the prosodic structure of their host (Wichmann 2011, Heine 2018). Moreover, erosion of grammaticalized elements has been argued to be typical of languages with strong segmental effects of stress and less so for languages with weak stress (Schiering 2010). Much less attention has been devoted to prosodic features of grammaticalization processes per se, and to the place of prosody among the factors driving linguistic change. The cross-linguistic differences in the prosodic correlates of grammaticalization, too, are understudied (Ansaldo & Lim 2004). This is partly due to a methodological impasse: more often than not, it is impossible to conduct historical studies including a prosodic strand as historical speech data are not available (Wichmann 2011). There are, however, ways to deal with this methodological difficulty. One strategy may be to draw on knowledge about stress, prosodic phrasing, and metrical structure in historical languages (e.g. Reinöhl & Casaretto 2018). Another is to consider cases in which grammaticalization manifests itself as a layered phenomenon, preserving non-grammaticalized (lexical) source items alongside their grammaticalized outcome: Dehé & Stathi (2016: 911, adapted) have shown that in these cases "different synchronically coexisting prosodic patterns [may] correspond to different degrees of grammaticalization". A further solution is to examine neighbouring varieties where the process of grammaticalization is at different stages. By simulating time with space, the different steps in the grammaticalization process can be linked to experimentally measurable features. Moreover, the inclusion of a prosodic dimension in the analysis allows casting light on the role of information structure in grammaticalization. Magistro (2023b) (see also Magistro et al. 2022, Magistro & Crocco 2022, Magistro 2023a) has investigated the three acoustic dimensions of duration, intensity and pitch in the use of the negator mica/miga/mia in different Venetan varieties, which represent different degrees of grammaticalization. In one of these varieties, Gazzolese, mia has completed Jespersen's cycle in that it can be used not only as a special illocutionary negation, as in other Venetan varieties, but also as a standard negator (Payne 1985, Miestamo 2005): in the latter use, it is shorter, reduced, and it lacks a pitch accent. Erosion reflects the loss of focal features and consequently of metrical strength in the new standard negator (Magistro 2023b). Research on the emergence of discourse markers, on the other hand, has explored more consistently the role of prosody in this process, showing that they tend to be more separated prosodically from their environment than the expressions from which they historically derive (
The prosody-pragmatics interface
Journal of Pragmatics, 2006
Phoneticians. The aim of the issue is to illustrate the role that prosody can play in the interpretation of pragmatic meaning, including both emotive and social meanings. The papers represent a variety of theoretical approaches, from Relevance Theory to Conversation Analysis, and refer to a wide range of prosodic phenomena, both phonological and paralinguistic, categorical and gradient.
The paper addresses the differences between ecological data and laboratory elicited data for the study of the semantics/pragmatics of prosody. A new experiment design -Rep Task-is presented. It is based on a reduplication task: subjects are asked to reenact a conversation that has been recorded beforehand and turned into a script. Thus, the data consist in several renditions of the same conversation: one (the original) has been produced in a natural setting while the other(s) are read off the script of the original conversation. Those renditions may be compared in order to discover the extent to which and how they differ or match. A pilot study is reported: it is based on a 12 minutes' extract of a dialogue taken from the CID corpus . Two case studies are developed to illustrate the type of evidence Rep Task may contribute. One is the use of a particular pitch contour identified by Portes et al. 2007 under the label "rising of list". The other is the restriction on pitch range and pitch contour associated with the use of reprise declaratives in the interactive management of topic flow. We conclude that subject's choices in the lab converge with speakers' choices in everyday interactions. This conclusion about prosodic choices is in line with Bresnan's 2007 conclusions about lexicosyntactic choices.
Prosody and meaning: theory and practice
Prosodic elements such as stress and intonation are generally seen as providing both ‗natural' and properly linguistic input to utterance comprehension. They typically create impressions, convey information about emotions or attitudes, or alter the salience of linguistically possible interpretations rather than conveying distinct propositions or concepts in their own right. These aspects of communication present a challenge to pragmatic theory: how should they be described and explained? This chapter examines some of the theoretical questions raised in the study of the pragmatics of prosody. It explores a range of distinctions made in the study of meaningbetween natural meaning and non-natural meaning, coding and inference, between linguistic coding and non-linguistic codingand considers their relation to prosody. Three theoretical questions are asked: How can the different types of prosody be characterised? What is the relationship between prosody and intentional communication? What kind of meaning does prosody encode? In the final section of the chapter the discussion is extended to the practical domain. To what extent is the theoretical debate reflected in the teaching of English pronunciation? Can the theory usefully inform the practice?
Where prosody meets pragmatics: research at the interface
2009
Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning, and it is well known that prosody -or, more informally, •tone of voice' -can contribute crucially to that meaning. Pragmatic effects in speech are thus the product of both what is said and how it is said, and the two are inextricably linked However, while many working in pragmatics are well aware of the important contnbution of prosody, exactly bow these effects are generated is harder to establish. A number of the ways in which prosody plays a pragmatic role are set out in this volume. It aims to give a cross-section of the many different topics and approaches within the field of prosody and its interface with pragmatics. , in his textbook on pragmatics, acknowledged that the absence of prosody from his account, particularly intonation, was a serious omission, but justified the omission on two grounds: first that there was as yet no agreement on how to analyse intonation, and second that the area was understudied Twenty-five years on, the American autosegmental model, captured in the ToBI transcription system. has become the international standard in intonational phonology (e.g. Ladd, 19%; Gussenhoven, 2004), and for typological comparison (Jun, 2005), but other models still continue to have currency, including variations of the British system ofholistic contours (fall, rise, fall-rise etc.). None, however, accounts sufficiently for all pragmatic effects of prosody_ which also derive from the kind of effects often referred to as paralinguistic.
Although usually taken for granted, it is anything but clear that prosodic elements are organized into autonomous prosodic structures such as intonational phrases. A framework is outlined within which the structural and communicative organization of prosodic elements in samples of natural discourse might be discovered inductively. The framework assumes that the structural organization of a stretch of speech consists of the set of recurrent patterns it contains (including prosodic patterns), and that such patterns are recognizable to speakers. It is further hypothesized that in the normal or usual case, logically independent patterns (e.g., the placement of pauses vs. the placement of intonational cadences) will converge or unify; and that if they do not unify, speakers may draw special pragmatic inferences from this fact. Three samples of natural speech are analyzed in order to present the approach and demonstrate three key properties of the prosodic structure that it uncovers: (a) the potential independence of prosodic patterns and thematic structure; (b) the potential for bundles of prosodic elements to recur as prosodic 'macrostructures,' often associated by speakers with particular styles, contexts, and social personas; (c) the potential for prosodic patterns (and elements) to carry meaning that is iconic in character, but regulated by culturally specific conventions and practices.