Sum: prosodic marking OF function words
Jeff Deby
debyj at georgetown.edu
Sat May 12 08:25:53 UTC 2001
Hello all,
My thanks to all who replied. Below is an omnibus of responses which
included references or related observations. Thanks also to those who
e-mailed me just to express interest in the topic.
Jeff
--
Jeff Deby
PhD Candidate, Sociolinguistics
Georgetown University
debyj at georgetown.edu
Hello Jeff Deby,
I did once write briefly about this phenomenon, though I can't
for the life of me remember where. I do remember, though,
what I thought was going on. I'm pretty sure, too, that
I reached my conclusion through discussions with Bob Ladd,
so you may want to look in his book Intonational Phonology
(CUP) to see if you can find his take on it.
The pattern seems to arise with people who have to say the
same thing over and over again, or at least use the same
content words over and over again (football commentators,
for instance - the action changes but the lexical items are
constant). Normally accent falls on content words. But if
content words are repeated, the second occurrences will be
deaccented. I think that what is happening in these cases -
not accentuation of the function words, but unconscious and
automation deaccentuation of repeatedly used content words,
leading effectively to comparatively heavier accent on the
function words.
Best wishes, and good luck with your work --
Anne Cutler
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Dear Jeff
David Faber and myself wrote an article on this subject. The reference is:
A. Cruttenden and D. A. Faber, *'The accentuation of prepositions', Journal
of Pragmatics (1991), 15, 265-86.
You'll also finfd some discussion in the second edition of my book
'Intonation' published by CUP in 1997.
Alan cruttenden/
Jeff,
I don't know of any references right now, but I find THE phenomenon to BE
frequent IN political speech in Spain. But, I don't think it consists of
accenting just function words. Rather, it's like a prosodic template
superposed to intonational phrases. Some accents fall on function words,
others on lexical words, even on lexically unstressed syllables.
I've observed it is typical to emphasize the first syllable of intonational
groups. Since often these words are articles, prepositions, conjunctions,
etc., THE impression ensues / THAT only function words / ARE emphasized. A
constructed example:
EL partido socialista
CON su política decidida
DE integración social
DE igualdad
Y de progreso
QUIEre destacar
QUE los trabajadores ...
I don't know if the case is the same with English. Flight attendant
intonation is a special case, it must be the only universal register in the
world ;-) . I would also say that the phenomenon may be different in each
of those speech styles you mention (sportscasters, politicians, etc.).
Best,
-celso
Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
lxalvarz at udc.es
Hi Jeff,
The following article has been very
helpful/interesting to me. It's not directly on what
you're asking about, but close--about how/when
auxiliaries are stressed phrase-finally.
Sharon Inkelas and Draga Zec. "Auxiliary Reduction
without empty categories" Working Papers of the
Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 1993, vol. 8, 205-253.
I would be very interested in other articles that you
turn up and in the direction of your research. I am a
PhD candidate in English using prosodic phonology to
discuss metrics and prosody in poems. I'd be
interested to learn more of what you are doing. The
ability/choice to stress or not stress function words
has been very important to 20th c. American poetry, as
much as hockey!
Best,
Natalie (Gerber-Lash)
Hi Jeff,
Your works sound interesting. Maybe not directly related but Korean
speakers seem to emphasize function words prosodically. In Seoul
Korean (so-called the standard accent of Korean) when an utterance is
produced, it is usually the case that prosodic subphrasing takes place in
a way that a pitch accent is located on the right edge of each phrase.
These prosodic subphrases are often called 'accentual phrase' and the
right-edge position is usually the postion where function words are
located. An examples is:
na-nun Mary-rul sarang-hae.
I-Topical Mary-Accusitive love-Declarative_ending.
"I love Mary"
The function words "nun" and "rul" are all pitch accented as they are
located at the right edge of each accentual phrase. More detailed
discussion you can refer to:
Sun-Ah Jun. 1998. The Accentual Phrase in the Korean prosodic
hierarchy. Phonology. vol 15(2): 189-226.
This case of emphasising may not be based on the semantics of the function
words, but I thought it can at least support the idea that prosodic
emphasising does not necessarily avoid the semantically less counted
positions.
Cheers to your research.
Tae.
=================================
Tae-Yeoub Jang, PhD
Research Fellow
Natural Language Processing Lab
Department of Computer Science
Sogang University
Sinsu-dong, Mapo-gu
Seoul 121-742, South Korea
Phone: +82 2 706 8954 (lab)
+82 16 9210 3637 (mobile)
jeff,
there's been quite a lot of work on this, especially in sports commentator
speech - tennis, snooker, soccer, racing, etc. the work of catherine
johns-lewis springs to mind. as far as i know, though, there's been
relatively little on how or why this happens (except that it's a particular
style of speech). for reasons why it might happen, see my 1993 article in
Journal of pragmatics 19, "what determines accentuation?": briefly, the idea
is that function words become candidates for emphasis when all the content
words in the same domain are either semantically empty or predictable from
the context: this may well occur in the genres where this style is common!
regards,
alex.
Dear Jeff
I teach Speech Stream English to facilitate 2nd language acquisition by
Asian adults, so I'm not an expert in your field. But I have noticed the
same phenomenon when I am screening radio recordings I make. My guess is, it
is a device to capture and hold attention by breaking down the usual
(expected) prosodic patterns.
Best wishes
Sue Sullivan
University of Canterbury
Christchurch
New Zealand
Dear Jeff,
I noticed this phenomenon in my corpus of Egyptian Standard Arabic,
especially
in news broadcasts, but only at the beginning of phrases. It seems to me
that it
is a kind of strengthening of one end of a prosodic domain, but it might
still
have some semantic/pragmatic reason as well.
Caroline Fery has noticed this in her Intonational phonology of German as
well,
she thinks it to be related to news broadcasts only.
I am not sure if the instances you mentioned are all at the beginning of
phrases, it doesn't seem so, but you should consider this probability.
Best regards,
Dina
Ah, I'm glad someone is finally looking at this! I've been wondering
about it for years. Please do post a summary, I'd love to know what's out
there. (Sorry I don't know of anything myself) Speaking of "do", that
seems to be part of this phenomenon: a redundant auxiliary "do" is added
(and also stressed) where it wouldn't ordinarily be needed, as in "We DO
suggest that you take all your personal belongings..."
Ellen C-M
this thing that you mention (i'm neither linguist nor prosidist if that's
even a word), but this thing seems to be everywhere. it even gets translated
into body language by newscasters. watch the eyebrows of CNN heads.
Maz881 at aol.com
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