Prosody and Narrative Structure in Varieties of Low German and Alemannic

Abstract

This study analyzes prosodic cues and discourse markers in varieties of Low German and Alemannic in order to uncover how narrative structure is cued lexically and prosodically in different varieties of German. Intonational boundary tones, discourse markers, and pauses turned out to be sufficient to cue discourse units at different levels. Although the varieties under discussion use the same type of linguistic features, there are important differences of detail in pause distribution and categorization, functions of certain pitch contours, and the use and function of discourse markers, so that the particular set of contextualization cues is quite different for the various levels of discourse in each variety. © 2003, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.