Realizations of prosodypauseaccentpitch resetintonational parallelismintonational contour

Functions of Prosodysignals phonological structuresignals syntactic structuresignals discourse prominencesignals affectabets information flow

Introduction

Prosody as Cohesionhelps listeners to detect discourse boundaries, and the degree ofcohesion or discontinuity between successive utterancesstructure (whether phonological or syntactic) is always cohesion-forming

This study shows how prosodic features are used by speakers tolend cohesion to their discourse, by signaling the transitions fromone unit of discourse to the next, the relations that hold betweenthose units, and their relative prominence.

Background, Data & MethodsÉkegusií (Gusii, Kisii), Great Lakes Bantu, southwest KenyaEndangered: ~600,000 speakers, few under 30 y.o.24 folktales recorded near Kisii Town, Kenya, Summer 2014Lexical database, with audio, ~14,000 wordsTexts annotated for prosodic features listed aboveProsodic boundaries were not marked - just the features

PausesThe length of pauses helps structure the text into its narrative stages

Pauses (cont.)the participants are introduced and given descriptions, topic-comment style, each separated by a long pausethe complicating action is a sequence of utterances, where eachutterance correspond to one step in a sequence of eventseach step in the complicating action is followed by a long pause,creating a slower narrative pacingpauses are extremely short during the movement toward the climax,creating a rapid pacing

Speakers use pauses to structure texts into major narrativesections, and control their pacing, thereby giving cohesion to eachsection.

Vowel ElisionÉkegusií typically elides vowels at word junctionsSometimes elision fails to occur phrase-internally, creating minorprosodic breaks

Vowel elision can be manipulated to create minor prosodic breaks evenwithout pause, most typically at the transition to reported speech, or todemarcate distinct events in a rapid sequence.

Intonational ParallelismIsotony or intonational parallelism is the realization of the sameintonational contour on separate, typically successive, stretches ofspeech.By repeating the same intonational contour across two stretches ofspeech, the speaker highlights a similarity between them, whether inform or semantic content.

Intonational Parallelism (cont.)

Pitch ResetProblems determining pitch reset:

canonical cases of pitch reset are rare in the Ékegusií corpusterminal contours or prosodic accent may interrupt declination trendspitch may reset down rather than upmany utterances show a flat contour or even a gradual risereported speech consistency shows a higher register

Pitch reset is best understood as a more holistic property of how hearersperceive phrases, abstracting away from the parts of the pitch contourthat are irrelevant to the overall trend.

Intonational ContourÉkegusií has many types of intonational contours, each with a dedicatedfunction. Classifying these contours as simply H or L, or falling or rising,fails to capture important differences between them. Some examples:

sharp terminal rise: backgrounding function, for conditionals, newtopics, and ‘when’-clausesgradual terminal rise: continuing topic, more information to comehigh level register: extended sequences of eventssharp fall to low register: conclusion of sequence of events

Speakers attend to the overall, conventionalized pattern of theintonational contour, rather than individual pitch targets.

ConclusionEach prosodic feature helps delineate units of discourse and convey theirrelationship to the units around them. These features work in tandem tocreate stronger or weaker breaks in the discourse, thereby creatinghierarchical prosodic structure.

The cohesive function of prosody in Ékegusií (Kisii) folktalesDaniel W. Hieber (University of California, Santa Barbara) ~ danielhieber.com

ACAL 48, Indiana University, March 30 - April 2, 2017. Research supported by NSF GRFP Grant No. 1144085.