Research

Ohio State Dissertations in Linguistics (OSDL)

Rebecca Herman (1998)

Intonation and Discourse Structure in English: Phonological and Phonetic Markers of Local and Global Discourse Structure

Advisor: Mary Beckman

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Abstract:

This dissertation examines the relationship between sound structure and discourse structure in English. In English, phrases are marked by edge tones which have discourse functions. A high edge tone indicates that the phrase is to be interpreted with respect to a subsequent phrase, while a low edge tone meansthat the phrase does not form an interpretive unit with the subsequent phrase. How the tones in a phrase marked by a low edge tone are implemented phonetically conveys how complete a sub-topic is. Thus the choice of edge tone conveys local discourse relationships between pairs of phrases while the phonetic implementation conveys global discourse relationships--the grouping of sets of phrases into topics and sub-topics.

These hypotheses about the discourse functions of edge tone categories and phonetic implementation were tested experimentally using pairs of discourses with at least two sub-topics in which the sub-topics occurred in different orders. The expectation is that the phrase at the end of a sub-topic will have the same choice of edge tones in both orders of occurrence, but that the tones in the phrase will be implemented differently in the two cases. The experiment involved short discourses which were recorded, transcribed tonally, played to listeners to see if they could distinguish the utterances by discourse position, and analyzed acoustically.

The results showed that the same edge tones were used in a large proportion of the utterances,verifying that edge tones mark local discourse relationships. Inthe utterances which were identifiable by listeners as to discourse location and which had the same or similar sequences of tones, the phonetic implementation of the tones varied in systematic ways between the two utterances in a pair, thus verifying the hypothesis that phonetic implementation of tones signals global discourse relationships.

In sum, this dissertation explores how phonological and phonetic aspects of the intonational structure function as linguistic cues to local and global information structure in discourses.