Prosody vs. Syntax: Prosodic rebracketing of final vocatives in English

Abstract

We examine the prosodic incorporation of utterance-final vocatives in American English. Our report is based on two separate experiments to test the claim by Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986) ([1]) and Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg ([9]) that the phonetic manifestation of an L* tone on the final vocative is indicative of its contrastive behavior. Our first experiment, involving the dramatic reading of two scenes from a make-believe play, shows that in contexts approximating natural speech, final vocatives are prosodically integrated into the matrix structure. A second experiment with decontextualized”out-of-the-blue” readings, by contrast, shows patterns similar to Beckman and Pierrehumbert (1986)([1]) and Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg ([9]).