Parentheticals in Spoken English: The Syntax-Prosody Relation (Studies in English Language) - Softcover

Dehé, Nicole

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1108403883 ISBN 13: 9781108403887

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Book Description:

Parentheticals have traditionally been assumed to lie outside the syntactic structure of the clause in which they are embedded, and in spoken English their external nature is marked by a difference in intonation. This study re-examines parentheticals and argues that they actually operate at the syntax-prosody interface.

About the Author:

Nicole Dehé is a Professor of General Linguistics at Universität Konstanz, Germany.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1108403883
• ISBN 13: 9781108403887
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260