Short information units

Our main goal is to show that short information units (one phonological word immediately preceded and followed by a prosodic boundary, at least one of which with non-terminal value) can be classified only on the basis of their formal prosodic characteristics. That is to say that lexicon and syntax may vary with respect to the informational function, while what formally marks the informational function is the regularity of the prosodic profile of the lexical item. We also maintain that an information unit corresponds to an intonation unit (except in one specific circumstance). We use just one lexeme for the analysis, the Brazilian Portuguese ASSIM, and extract all the occurrences where this lexeme is found in a dedicated prosodic unit in the C-ORAL-BRASIL corpus. According to our analysis, this lexeme can fulfill at least five different information units, i.e. it can fulfill at least five different linguistic functions, recognizable by their prosodic regularities.

das ist ein: (--) äh ja ANschluss ja. Das ja als Turnhalte- und Anschlusssignal im gesprochenen Deutsch.

Spoken production is subjected to speed and needs in the conversations that can locally be changed, which makes it dynamic and flexible. Often the thematic framework of the next ut-terance is determined while the appropriate complex linguistic construction for it is not yet available. Delays and pauses before continuing in the utterances are traces of searching words and an indication that we often decide on the linguistic structure in terms of complex and schematic constructions in the construction grammar before we fill it with vocabulary. This paper is about the functions of organizing the conversations, phonetic and phonological fea-tures of a particular ja from within the turn, often the utterance, and the intonation unit in German which at the problems of finding words of speakers mainly mean "immediately re-sume". In this context, intonation incorporation of this ja into what is uttered just before and immediately after it, is especially indicative. Continuation-ja with independent intonation contour namely announces new construction, while intonation incorporated continuation-ja prevents premature conclusion of the listener that the sentence will be interrupted and an-nounce one or more components of the utterance or correction of specific components.

On Transcription and Oral Transmission in Aseneth: A Study of the Narrative’s Conception

The purpose of this article is to investigate and elucidate the oral aspects of Joseph and Aseneth. This is to suggest that Joseph and Aseneth had an oral tradition that preceded, and likely also proceeded, the written version(s) that is (are) now extant. The text is best understood using oral hermeneutics. By making this argument I do not postulate any one oral or written genre for the text, nor any argument for how it might have been composed. Instead, I seek to demonstrate that Joseph and Aseneth retains strong residual orality. Many of the oral features of the text are salient in its written form, including: the consistent use of paratactic καί; the use of the ‘intonation unit’; the one new idea constraint, which is often accomplished by the form ἦν; the visible and descriptive nature of the narrative; and the redundancy of certain words and phrases. The second half of the article offers some repercussions that an oral existence of the narrative might have on Joseph and Aseneth scholarship. The most pertinent effects relate to the assumption that Joseph and Aseneth is a Jewish Hellenistic romance novel and to the scholarly divide concerning the ‘originality’ of the longer b-family textual recension as opposed to the shorter d-family textual recension.

Intonation unit boundaries and the storage of bigrams

Much recent work on language and cognition has examined the psychological status of collocations/formulas/multi-word expressions as mentally stored units. These studies have used a variety of statistical metrics to quantify the degree of strength or association of these sequences, and then they have correlated these strengths with particular behavioral effects that evidence mental storage. However, the relationship between intonational prosody and storage of collocations has received little attention. Through a corpus-based approach, this study examines the hypothesis that boundaries between successive intonation units avoid splitting word bigrams that exhibit high statistical association, with such high association taken to be an index of mental storage of these bigrams. Conversely, bigrams exhibiting lower statistical association ought to be more likely to be split by intonation unit boundaries under this hypothesis.

The Late Medieval Greek Vernacular Πολιτικὸς Στίχος Poetry: A Modern Linguistic Analysis into Intonation Units

The Late Medieval Greek “vernacular” (12th–15th c.) is one of the least studied stages of the history of the Greek language. The lack of interest by linguists can presumably be ascribed to its major source, i.e. metrical πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry. The language of this type of poetry has been labelled a “Kunstsprache”, because of its oral-formulaic character and because of its mixed idiom incorporating vernacular yet also archaizing elements. In this article, however, I demonstrate that the Late Medieval Greek πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry should not automatically be excluded from linguistic research, given that it clearly possesses a strongly vernacular, i.e. spoken, syntactic base: its underlying syntax runs in a very natural way. This is proven by the fact that we can apply the modern linguistic concept of the Intonation Unit, the basic unit of analysis in contemporary spoken(!) languages, to the texts composed in the πολιτικὸς στίχος: far from having an artificial syntax, the πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry is conceptually made up of short, simple “chunks” of information. More precisely, each verse consists of two (stylized) Intonation Units, demarcated by the fixed caesura, which can thus be equated with an Intonation Unit boundary. This thesis is supported by various arguments, both of a metrical and of a syntactico-semantic nature. Arguments belonging to the former category are the length of each half-line, the possibility of stress on the first syllable of each half-line, the origin of the metre, and especially the avoidance of elision at the caesura. In the second category of (syntactico-semantic) evidence, we can consider the tendency of each half-line for constituting a grammatical sense-unit. I also bring forward some little-studied syntactic features of Late Medieval Greek: first, I pay attention to the distribution of the archaizing “Wackernagel particles”, which do not only appear in second position in the verse, but also occur after the first word/constituent following the caesura and thus further confirm my thesis. The same holds for the position of “corrective afterthoughts”, for the verbs and pronominal objects taking the singular are consistently separated from their plural referents by the caesura. Once the Intonation Unit is thus established as a meaningful methodological tool for the analysis of the πολιτικὸς στίχος poetry, the way is cleared for more linguistic research on the Late Medieval Greek vernacular.

What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation

In languages with variable subject expression, or “pro-drop” languages, when do speakers use subject pronouns? We address this question by investigating the linguistic conditioning of Spanish first-person singular pronoun yo in conversational data, testing hypotheses about speakers' choice of an expressed subject as factors in multivariate analysis. Our results indicate that, despite a widely held understanding of a contrastive role for subject pronouns, yo expression is primarily driven by cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors. In cognitive terms, we find that yo is favored in the presence of human subjects intervening between coreferential 1sg subjects (a refined measure of the well-described phenomenon of “switch-reference”). A mechanical effect is observed in two distinct manifestations of priming: the increased rate of yo when the previous coreferential first singular subject was realized as yo and when the subject of the immediately preceding clause was realized pronominally. And evidence for a particular yo + cognitive verb construction is provided by a speaker-turn effect, the favoring of yo in a turn-initial Intonation Unit, that is observed with cognitive (but not other) verbs, which form a category centered around high frequency yo creo ‘I think’.

Prosody as a genre-distinguishing feature in Ahtna

This article is a quantitative examination of the function of prosody in distinguishing between the genres of oral performance and expository discourse in Ahtna, an Athabascan language of south-central Alaska. Within the framework of the intonation unit (e.g., Chafe 1987) I examine features of prosody related to both timing (intonation unit length and duration, pause duration and distribution, and syllable pacing) and pitch (pitch reset, boundary tones, and intonational phrasing). I show to a statistically significant degree that most of the prosodic burden of distinguishing genre is carried by a particular intonation contour that is associated with Ahtna oral performance and causes several measurable distinctions between genres.