Parentheticals in Spoken English: The Syntax-Prosody Relation

Abstract

Because of the nature of interface studies, the book presupposes a certain amount of background knowledge of phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Dehé introduces the relevant basic concepts of theoretical as well as descriptive notions when necessary, but the reader is expected to be familiar with notions such as ToBI, prosodic hierarchy, merge, Align/Wrap/Match theories, conventional implicatures (CIs), and so forth. In addition to the new fi ndings drawn from the careful inspection of spoken English data, this book features a very clear, and sometimes critical, evaluation of numerous previous studies, which will be, in and of itself, a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in the syntax-prosody interface, as well as in the prosody of parentheticals. The traditional, and often taken-for-granted assumption on the prosody of parentheticals, is that they constitute an independent intonational domain. Dehé's work shows that the prosodic separation is a very strong tendency in FPCs, NRRCs, N-APPs, and QTs, but that integration should be considered as default phrasing, even as more variation is observed in CCs and RVs. Importantly, she attempts to clarify what factors cause the variation by resorting not only to statistical analyses, but also to semantic and pragmatic analyses. Research of this type will contribute to determining what the basic intonational phrasing resulting from syntax-phonology mapping is, and what modifi es it in the phonological component. While this book lacks detailed semantic and pragmatic analyses for explaining the variation in phrasing (which, of cours e, goes way beyond the scope of this study), the results of this work nevertheless indicate that the mechanism relating syntax with prosody should be formulated independently of prosodic markedness constraints and pragmatic factors that alter the basic intonational phrasing, unlike the current Match Theory, where match constraints interact with markedness constraints directly (i.e. in the same tableau). That is, the prosodic phrasing algorithm should take the form of a modular architecture consisting of the computation generating basic prosodic phrases, and the modifi cation of phrasing triggered by pragmatic as well as prosodic factors. This book is expected to become a seminal work, which will engender further research into parentheticals.