Parentheticals in Spoken English

Transcription

1 Parentheticals in Spoken English Taking both an empirical and a theoretical view of the prosodic phrasing of parentheticals in English, this book reviews the syntactic and prosodic literature on parentheticals along with relevant theoretical work at the syntax prosody interface. It offers a detailed prosodic analysis of six types of parentheticals; full parenthetical clauses, non-restrictive relative clauses, nominal appositions, comment clauses, reporting verbs and question tags, all taken from the spoken part of the British Component of the International Corpus of English. To date, the common assumption is that, by default, parentheticals are prosodically phrased separately, an assumption which, as this study shows, is not always in line with the predictions made by current prosodic theory. The present study provides new empirical evidence for the prosodic phrasing of parentheticals in spontaneous and semi-spontaneous spoken English, and offers new implications for a theory of linguistic interfaces. NICOLE DEHÉ is a Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Konstanz.

2 STUDIES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE General editor Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) Editorial Board Bas Aarts (University College London), John Algeo (University of Georgia), Susan Fitzmaurice (University of Sheffield), Christian Mair (University of Freiburg), Charles F. Meyer (University of Massachusetts) The aim of this series is to provide a framework for original studies of English, both present-day and past. All books are based securely on empirical research, and represent theoretical and descriptive contributions to our knowledge of national and international varieties of English, both written and spoken. The series covers a broad range of topics and approaches, including syntax, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, discourse, pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and is aimed at an international readership. Already published in this series: Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar Schneider and Jeffrey Williams : The Lesser-Known Varieties of English: An Introduction Hilde Hasselgård : Adjunct Adverbials in English Raymond Hickey : Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change Charles Boberg : The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis Thomas Hoffmann : Preposition Placement in English: A Usage-based Approach Claudia Claridge : Hyperbole in English: A Corpus-based Study of Exaggeration Päivi Pahta and Andreas H. Jucker (eds.): Communicating Early English Manuscripts Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds.): Medical Writing in Early Modern English Colette Moore : Quoting Speech in Early English David Denison, Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Chris McCully and Emma Moore (eds.): Analysing Older English Jim Feist : Premodifiers in English: Their Structure and Significance Steven Jones, M. Lynne Murphy, Carita Paradis and Caroline Willners : Antonyms in English: Construals, Constructions and Canonicity Christiane Meierkord : Interactions across Englishes: Linguistic Choices in Local and International Contact Situations Haruko Momma : From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century Raymond Hickey (ed.): Standards of English: Codified Varieties Around the World Benedikt Szmrecsanyi : Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects: A Study in Corpus-Based Dialectometry Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (eds.): English as a Contact Language Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis (eds.): The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora Martin Hilpert : Constructional Change in English: Developments in allomorphy, word formation, and syntax Jakob R. E. Leimgruber : Singapore English: Structure, Variation and Usage Christoph Rühlemann : Narrative in English Conversation Dagmar Deuber : English in the Caribbean: Variation, Style and Standards in Jamaica and Trinidad Jock Onn Wong : English in Singapore: A Cultural Analysis Eva Berlage : Noun Phrase Complexity in English : Parentheticals in Spoken English: The Syntax Prosody Relation Earlier titles not listed are also available

3 Parentheticals in Spoken English The Syntax Prosody Relation NICOLE DEH É University of Konstanz

4 University Printing House, Cambridge CB 2 8 BS, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. Information on this title: / This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2014 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Dehé, Nicole. Parentheticals in spoken English : the syntax prosody relation /. pages cm. (Studies in English language) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (hardback) 1. English language Parenthetical constructions. 2. Grammar, Comparative and general Parenthetical constructions. 3. English language Spoken English. 4. English language Syntax. I. Title. P D dc ISBN Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

5 Contents List of figures List of tables page vii ix 1 Parentheticals in English: introduction Parentheticals a motley crew The data This study 17 2 The syntax and prosody of parentheticals The syntax of parentheticals and the relation between parenthetical and host Prosodic features of parentheticals The syntax and prosody of six selected types of parentheticals Full parenthetical clauses Non-restrictive (appositive) relative clauses Nominal appositions Comment clauses Reporting verbs Question tags Concluding remarks 84 3 Parentheticals, intonational phrasing and prosodic theory Intonational phrasing: the Tone Group and the Intonational Phrase Prosodic separation and the correspondence between the Tone Group and the Intonational Phrase The syntax prosody interface: the relation between syntactic and prosodic constituents Data analysis, results and discussion Data source and data retrieval Full parenthetical clauses Non-restrictive relative clauses 119 v

6 vi Contents Nominal appositions Comment clauses Reporting verbs Question tags General notes on data retrieval Data treatment Analysis and results Full parenthetical clauses Non-restrictive relative clauses Nominal appositions Comment clauses Reporting verbs Question tags Summary Final discussion 227 References 234 Index 247

7 Figures Figure 2.1 Example (2.38): parenthetical insertion with prototypical parenthetical properties page 37 Figure 2.2 Example (2.43)b: prosodic, but not syntactic, parenthesis 41 Figure 3.1 Non-recursive and recursive pitch structures 95 Figure 3.2 Example (3.12), from Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986: 295): two possible realizations of an accented sentence-final QT 100 Figure 4.1 Example (4.25): example analytic procedure 132 Figure 4.2 Example (4.32): full parenthetical clause, prosodic separation 139 Figure 4.3 Example (4.39): full parenthetical clause, prosodic integration 143 Figure 4.4 Example (4.46): NRRC, prosodic separation 148 Figure 4.5 Example (4.47), phrasing as in (4.51) 150 Figure 4.6 Example (4.59): N-APP, prosodic separation 157 Figure 4.7 Example (4.60): N-APP with pronominal anchor, prosodic separation 158 Figure 4.8 Example (4.61): N-APP phrased together with anchor 159 Figure 4.9 Example (4.66): N-APP phrased together with anchor and following host material 162 Figure 4.10 Example (4.83): CC, prosodic separation 178 Figure 4.11 Example (4.84): CC phrased in a CPD 179 Figure 4.12 Example (4.85): CC with nuclear prominence, phrased together with preceding host material 181 Figure 4.13 Example (4.88): CC unstressed and phrased together with following host material 184 Figure 4.14 Example (4.89): CC phrased together with preceding and following host material, unstressed 185 Figure 4.15 Example (4.90): CC phrased together with preceding and following host material, part of hesitant stretch 187 Figure 4.16 Example (4.94): CC, an alternative analysis to that of Kaltenböck (2010: 252) 192 Figure 4.17 Example (4.100): simple RV, prosodic separation 196 Figure 4.18 Example (4.104): simple RV, encliticized 199 Figure 4.19 Example (4.105): complex RV, encliticized 201 vii

8 viii List of figures Figure 4.20 Example (4.112): QT, prosodic separation 208 Figure 4.21 Example (4.113): QT, prosodic separation 209 Figure 4.22 Example (4.121): QT unstressed, prosodic integration with preceding host material 214 Figure 4.23 Example (4.122): QT unstressed, prosodic integration with preceding and following host material 215 Figure 4.24 Example (4.123): QT unstressed, prosodic integration with preceding and following host material 217

9 Tables Table 1.1 Corpus references and text categories (see Nelson, Wallis and Aarts 2002) page 14 Table 2.1 Prosodic phrasing of parentheticals: predictions 85 Table 4.1 Summary of items 118 Table 4.2 Distribution numbers of QTs according to auxiliary verb in the tag ( be, do, have, modal) and type (reversed polarity tag: pos-neg, neg-pos; constant polarity tag: pos-pos, neg-neg) 126 Table 4.3 Patterns of prosodic phrasing of nominal appositions (N-APPs) 156 Table 4.4 Cross-tabulation of N-APPs according to phrasing and type 167 Table 4.5 Cross-tabulation of N-APPs according to phrasing and syntactic function 167 Table 4.6 Cross-tabulation of N-APPs according to phrasing and semantic relation between anchor and N-APP 168 Table 4.7 Cross-tabulation of N-APPs of semantic type equivalence Table 4.8 according to phrasing and type of N-APP 168 Cross-tabulation of N-APPs according to phrasing and position 168 Table 4.9 Patterns of prosodic phrasing of comment clauses (CCs) 176 Table 4.10 Phrasing/accent patterns of RVs according to position (final, non-final) 195 Table 4.11 Phrasing/accent patterns of RVs according to complexity (simple, complex) 195 Table 4.12 Cross-tabulation of QTs according to phrasing and intonation contour 220 Table 4.13 Cross-tabulation of QTs according to phrasing and polarity 220 Table 4.14 Cross-tabulation of QTs according to phrasing and position 221 Table 4.15 Cross-tabulation of QTs according to phrasing and verb type 221 Table 4.16 Prosodic phrasing: summary of results for six types of parentheticals 226 ix