Intonation as a cue to epistemic stance in one type of insubordinate clauses
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21463085 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mirjam Fried (0000-0002-8157-6858, Department of Linguistics , FF UK , Praha , Czech Republic, corresponding author), Pavel Machač (0000-0003-4200-4272, Department of Linguistics , FF UK , Praha , Czech Republic) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 183-214 |
| Publication date | 2022-04-26 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Folia Linguistica (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0165-4004 • E-ISSN: 1614-7308 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/flin-2022-2008 |
| OpenAlex | W4225367623 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 25 |
This corpus-based study focuses on the spoken nature of insubordination by analyzing intonation vis-à-vis interpersonal functions associated with specific insubordination patterns in spontaneously produced Czech conversations. This paper shows that there is a consistent relationship between the epistemic function of a given variant and its intonational contour: the pattern found in argumentative settings is associated with a conclusive, sharply falling cadence, while the variant found in collaborative contexts and imparting an explicative flavor has a slightly rising melody, suggesting inconclusiveness. We also discovered a clear parallelism between these two intonational variants and an intonational split in the embedded polar questions after the verb form nevím ‘I don’t know’, the most likely source of the insubordinate structures. This finding further motivates the interpersonal functions served by the insubordination patterns: the argumentative variant marks a high degree of confidence about p not being true, while the slightly rising contour of the explicative pattern marks a low degree of confidence in p being true, thus necessarily projecting tentativeness. The results strengthen the status of these patterns as conventional grammatical units distinct from their syntactic source; they show that their phonic properties provide salient interpretive cues; and they also contribute to the question of how we conceptualize the emergence of insubordination
Argumentative · Grammar · Interpersonal communication · Linguistics · Politeness · Salient · Verb · Computer Science · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Artificial Intelligence
Insubordination and its uses
Sound Patterns in Interaction
Construction Grammar as a tool for diachronic analysis
A typology of complement insubordination in Dutch
Pitch and the Projection of More Talk
Discourse, Pragmatics, Conversation, Analysis
(Semi-)autonomous subordination in Dutch
Prosody as a cue for syntactic dependency. Evidence from dependent and independent clauses with subordination marks in Spanish
The interpretation of the high-rise question contour in English
Construction Grammar and spoken language
The Extension of Dependency Beyond the Sentence
| Highly cited | No |
|---|