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Pétur KnútssonOrdination and sentence accent: some English and Icelandic differences.

Abstract:I shall discuss the subordinative tendency in English prose and the coordinative or appositive tendency in Icelandic prose, which is a well-documented syntactic/stylistic problem (for translators or example), and relate it to the little-discussed difference of “deaccenting” in spoken English as against “reaccenting” in spoken Icelandic. My rather speculative thesis will be that both effects are correlative, or at least have common denominators. This approach also entails a claim that the indexical functions of prose syntax, in particular the split between direct/indirect discourse and Bakhtinian dialogic discourse, can also be approached in terms of speakable and unspeakable intonation (or accentuation). I draw on the ideas of Alan Cruttenden (de- and re-accenting) and Charles Lock (unspeakable intonation).I shall not have time for the second part from “This approach” – far too sanguine.Some of this is material I have brought up before at a Matti-meeting, but I’ve re-thought it and my approach is different enough now to justify returning to it..

I shall start with a well-known problem of Icelandic writing in English.

Consider the following sentences:

1 Margrét byrjar í háskólanum í haust, en hún stefnir á lögfræði. 2 Jón var svangur, en hann hafði ekki borðað síðan um morguninn.

and their Icelandic English counterparts:

1a Margaret starts at university this autumn, but she wants to be a lawyer.2a Jon was hungry, but he hadn’t eaten since the morning.

The meaning of these 2 sentences in Native English is:

1b. Margaret starts at university this autumn, in spite of wanting to be a lawyer2b. John was hungry, even though he had not eaten since morning

So what’s the explanation?

The simple and superficial explanationis that "en" and "but" have different meanins:

English "but" joins two elements where the second one LIMITS or NEGATES the first, not simply defining the first. It is ALWAYS equivalent to “but on the other hand”, ”but in contrast”, “conversely”, “even though”.

Icelandic “en” can mean the same as English “but”,

i.e. introduce a contrast:

3 Margrét vaknaði snemma, en Jón svaf til ellefu3a Margaret woke early but John slept until eleven

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Now an explanation along these lines is inadequate to say the least, and not even a good heuristic to offer Icelandic students, because while these sentences can be patched up by saying “since” or “because” instead of “but”, that’s only a patch not a translation. Instead you

want to use a subordinative structure: 1c Margaret starts at university this autumn, with a view to becoming a lawyer2c John was hungry, not having eaten since morning

The underlying problem is that Iceland has a coordinative, apotactic tendency, while English prefers the hypotactic, subordinate style. Here are some more examples, this time ones I have not constructed.

Can we hazard good English translations?1 2

• Það er viðvörun í gangi, en búist er við stormi á norðvesturlandiA warning has been issued of…

• fjórir krossnefir voru í gær á Hvanneyri, er krossnefurinn verpir nú í febrúarwhich does in fact nest in February

• Félagsfundur í Flugvirkjafélagi Íslands kolfelldi nýjan kjarasamning í gærkvöldi, en samningurinn var gerður við Samstök atvinnulífsins á dögunum fyrir hönd Icelandair

1 Það er viðvörun í gangi, en búist er við stormi á norðvesturlandi (mánud 15 feb 2010 Rás 1 veðurfréttir kl 18:45)eiginleikinn í mér er bara drifinn áfram af forvitni og kannski pínulitlu hugrekki, en ég hef alltaf verið voðalega forvitin ATN USE LAST AKSO- has both deacc and enfjórir krossnefir voru í gær á Hvanneyri, er krossnefurinn verpir nú í febrúarað ímynda sér að þú sér sérfræðingur í - hvað draugum, eða – Ég veit nú ekki hvað það er, en ég hef gert kannanir til dæmis um reyslu manna af látnum ..Jú jú þar er nóg um að vera þar og við höldum áfram að sýna fullt í beinni útsendingu og tökum þetta síðan saman, en kínverska parið Sju Sén og Hong Bo Sjá sigraði í parakeppni í listhlaupi á skautum ....Fyrir það fyrsta gékk í desember annar dómur í héraðsdómi sem virðist ganga þvert gegn hinum nýja, en mnálið fer fyrir hæstarétthvassast var sem sagt á norðvestanverðu landinu yfirleitt en einna hægast á norð suðvestanverðu landinudregur yfirleitt úr vind en þó áfram strekkingur hér með austurströndinni

2 eiginleikinn í mér er bara drifinn áfram af forvitni (og kannski pínulitlu hugrekki,) en ég hef alltaf verið voðalega forvitin (and perhaps braveness, but I have always been driven by curiosity)

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Lack of en in translated parts of the news. 3 4

• apotaxis and hypotaxis, good cover-terms for the two different types, which appear in a variety of forms

I won’t go into the historical relationship between apotaxis and hypotaxis, although one should correct the view that subordination is a later development, which is unfounded by the evidence.5 Interestingly if we look at Old English we find similar forms of apotaxis

and he his feorh generede, and he wæs oft gewundod. 6

*He saved his life and he was wounded many times.He saved his life although he was wounded many times.Hann bjargaði lífi sínu en hann var margsærður7

Þa com se eawfæsta. to ðam eadigan cuðberhte. and he wæs on ðam timan. to prafoste geset. on ðam munuclife. þe is lindisfarnea gehaten.Then this married man came to Cuthbert the Blessed, and he was at that time established as provost of the monastery known as LindisfarneÞá kom sá sá kvænti til Kynbjarts hins sæla, en hann var í þá tíð settur prófastur í þeim munkaklaustri sem heitir Lindisfarne 8

here it is worth noting that Old English could use and in the same coordinate way that Icelandic uses what is etymologically the “same” word en. The Old English word for ‘but’ is ac, cognate with og, and as far as I can see it is only used in Old English with the contrastive meaning that but has in modern English. Only and can be used like Icelandic en.

To summarize the first part of this paper: There is a general tendency to use apotaxis and coordination in written and spoken Icelandic and a no less general tendency to use hypotaxis and subordination in English. Or to be hypotactic:

And this leads me to the second topic in this paper , using this slide as a point of transition 9

It’s clear that various elements of syntactic structure are signalled in the spoken language by prosodic features which syntacticians tend to ignore simply because they are underspecified in the written texts, which is as silly as ignoring the vowels in classical Hebrew and Arabic. So a

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good deal of what we are sometimes told are covert features – movement and trace and various indexicalities – is actually overtly present in the prosodic tier.

My discussion here will follow the so-called English School of phonetics as practised by Alan Cruttenden, Peter Roach and John Wells. Let me give you a brief outline of one aspect of this approach.

A stretch of spoken discourse is said to consist of IPs10, each of which corresponds roughly to the syntactic idea of the sentence or clause. Each IP in English and Icelandic consists of a succession of stressed syllables, interspersed by groups of zero or more unstressed syllables.

x x / x x x x / x x x / /Now the program has been delayed by about six months

(tendency towards isochronicity which creartes a notable speeading-up and slowing down effect.In each IP ONE of the stressed syllables, the Nucleus, is dominant although not necessarily salient, and this dominance is formally defined by the tone structure.11

Functionally, the nucleus serves to identify those pieces of information which correlate to features in earlier or later phrases and thus inform the whole structure of the discourse: that is to say that nucleus identification is an important factor in mapping out the indexical structure of the discourse.

What I shall focus here is that there seems at least in English and perhaps also in Icelandic to be a default or neutral position for the nucleus, used to signal what Cruttenden calls Broad Focus, where no particular single element of the IP is foregrounded, i.e. where there are no indexical connections which need to be signalled. Typically this is the rightmost stress:

Now the 'program has been de'layed by about 'six *MONTHS

compare moving the nucleus around:

Now the *program has been delayed by about six monthsNow the program has been delayed by about *six monthsNow the program has been delayed by a*bout six monthsNow the program *has been delayed by about six months

Now lets look at a larger chunk of this piece of discourse:

And applying the default rightmost rule:

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- which would in fact as we shall see be close to the normal Icelandic stress pattern.

BUT in English we have a mandatory prosodic movement here which Cruttenden calls deaccenting – the identification of repeated information in IPs by leftward movement (advancing the nucleus) away from the default position of the final stress.

Now we come to one of the differences between Icelandic and English. Å survey made by Cruttenden in the 1990s showed that deaccenting was mandatory in English and some other languages, optional in others, and rare or non-existent in yet others. Icelandic was not one of the languages he surveyed, but my observations indicate that although deaccenting can be found in Icelandic speech it is relatively rare: the default nucleus position does not depend on deaccenting. However I think I can show that Icelandic uses other tonal markers, other than nucleus movement, to indicate indexicality – although I’m not going to discuss that aspect here. Here are some examples:

gera ráð fyrir því að það verð að mestu leyti þurrt og jafnvel skýjað með köflum á norðaustanverðu *landinu | og hiti verði þetta átta til níu stig sunnan lands en nokkrum gráðum hærri hiti á norðanverðu *landinu.

Nei ég er það er ekkert rétt að við séum kom(in) með neinni niðurstöðu um það hvernig við ætlum að bregðast við | en við erum að vinna að því að halda áfram samstöðu allra flokka um það hvernig eigi að bregðast við ...

íbúafjöldinn um 0,06% af íbúum sambandsins, og þjóðaframleiðslan 0,08% af framleiðslu Evrópusambandsins

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hún verður hægri stjórn mynduð af flokkum kristilegra demókrata og frjálsra démokrata

það er nú reyndar sú þróun að eiga sér stað núna að áfallastreituröskun eða PTSD eins og það er líka kallað | sem er viðurkenndur sjúkdómur af alþjóða heilbrigðisstofnuninni |að það er smátt og smátt að verða áþreifanlegri mælingar á þeim sjúkdómi |og nú er íslenskt nýsköpunarfyrirtæki sem hlaut verðlaun í fyrra einmitt að gera rannsóknir á heilavirkni fólks sem að glímir við þennan sjúkdóm12.

Conclusion

So here we have 2 distinctive differences between English and Icelandic:

Icelandic prefers apotaxis – English prefers hypotaxis Deaccenting is mandatory in most native varieties of English, but only used

infrequently in Icelandic.

Is there a connection between these two features?

My expectation when I started to write this paper was that I could shown a connection. I think I can, but there is a good deal of counter-evidence.

This makes sense because:

We might expect that the subordination tendency, which in some ways breaks up the linear sequence of logical propositions,(and that is a very contentious remark) would demand clear prosodic patterns.For instance, since the effect of deaccenting is to identify given information we might expect it to feature strongly in highly subordinated discourse.

While a language which does not use much subordination might not find the need for extensive nucleus movement in order to identify shared or given information.

But you might just as well say that in apotaxis the discourse conditions are precisely NOT signalled by syntactical means, and so one might expect greater reliance on intonation and nucleus movement to bring out the discourse structure. (and I was too slow on the uptake to see this point until after I had put in my proposal for this paper)

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I tried translating this statement by the IMF spokesman in Iceland into Icelandic:

3 So we will find that where both written and spoken Icelandic has two coordinate sentences, often joined by en, a natural English translation will contain by a main clause and a subordinate clause, or simply a main clause with a non-finite clause or non-verbal phrase of some sort.4 There is some tendency to look upon the appostive or coordinative style as being simpler or somehow less sophisticated than complex subordination. I don’t know whether this is a symptom of the Icelandic inferiority complex or whether it is based on some mistaken idea that language is always becoming more sophisticated, more civilised, more complex, but it is certainly mistaken. To begin with, we must remember that the “simpler” appositive style is a powerful force in all literatures, from the Icelandic family sagas to Hemmingway to Þórbergur Þórðarson, and continues to be so. Virgil, whom we are told writes the finest classical Latin poetry, is said to have ushered in a new era of coordination and apotaxis which charmed his reader who were used to the complex subordination of the novi poets before him.? So I think we have to rule out the idea that the Icelandic appositive style is somehow more poorly developed, less mature than English subordination.

5 The dróttskáld with their convoluted poetry were oral poets, and although they were perhaps not particularly hypotactic they required their listeners to decipher some very complex syntax. Nevertheless it is true that earlier Germanic prose, and our best examples are from Old English, was appositive and coordinative in much the same way as modern Icelandic. Some examples may be informative:6 And hy þa ymb þa geatu feohtende wæron oð hi þærinne fulgon and þone æþeling ofslogon and þa men þe mid him wæron ealle butan anum, se wæs þæs ealdormannes godsunu, and he his feorh generede, and he wæs oft gewundod. 7 (Quirk and Wrenn 96 (para. 149): Parker Chronicle 755, British Library, MS. Cotton Tiberius B.IV seg428 (Ælfric, Second Series of Homilies [Catholic Homilies]: Cuthbert, seg07:85.140)9 Like everybody, be see our written protocol as being normal.But of course al writing systems are to some degree underspecified:

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Now the program has been delayed by about six months so there was a feeling that we needed to add six months at the end of the program to compensate for these delays

and found to my delight that an apotactic version of this passage uncovered its tautological structure – the IMF guy was talking nonsense:

Ferlinu seinkaði um sex mánuði, en við frestuðum ferlinu um sex mánuði til að vega upp á móti þessari seinkun. 13

and retranslated back into English and found I had an impossible problem of deaccenting on my hands:

We delayed the program by six months, and compensated for it by delaying the program for six months. !!!!

What we most need now is detailed indexical and prosodic analyses of large bodies of spoken discourse to identify the areas of correspondence, if there are any, between indexicality and prosody; and then hopefully between different coordinate and subordinate indexicalities. This seems to me to be work for students.

1792 words – 21 minutes

Classical Hebrew and Arabic texts do not specify the vowelsClassical Latin and Greek texts do no show spaces between wordsNobody shows sadhi effects as well as SanskritIcelandic shows allophonic variation more than it needs to (overspecification)None of these encode prosodic information apart form sporadic and inconsistent use of emphasis or CAPITAL LETTERS.10 units variously known as Intonation Phrases (IPs), Tone Units, Intonation Units11 The formal definitionof a nucleus: its type (5+ basic, several subtypes) controls the tone envolope from the nucleus until the end of the IP (whereas other pre-nuclear tone envelopes are relatively free). (But there are complex embedding and ovelay effects which may also occur). 12 Kastljós 17.2.2010. Þórdís Elva Þórgrímsdóttir, Sveinn Andri Sveinsson13 This intonation breaks the mandatory deaccenting rule in English , and can only occur because the discourse structure is corrupt: then sentence does not make sense. Very clever camouflage by this representative of the IMF in Iceland**(beginning of the) program, (end of the) program for six months.