题目：Grammaticalization and Prosody

演讲者：Nicole Dehé（德国康斯坦茨大学语言学系普通语言学教授）

时间：2019年10月31日（周四）14：00-15：30

地点：常熟理工学院东湖校区学术交流中心一楼大会议室

摘要：This paper studies the relationship between prosody and desemanticization in grammaticalization processes by means of two well-described phenomena: the grammaticalization of ‘type’ nouns (type, kind, sort; see (1)) in present-day English (Dehé & Stathi 2016), and the use of so-called comment clauses (I think, I believe etc., see(2)) in English (Dehé & Wichmann 2010), Icelandic (Dehé 2018) and Mandarin(Zhao, Dehé & Murphy 2018). Data are taken from corpora of spoken language for English and Icelandic and from an experimental setting for Mandarin. All tokens were semantically classified and prosodically analysed.

(1)  a.    … the Government attacks British Rail forfailing to survive the cold. BR says it’s the wrong type of snow. (ICE-GB: s2b-002 #008-0)

b.  And lastly for falsetto the the cords arevery stretched and thin to produce this kindof voice quality (ICE-GB: s2a-056 #077

c. It’s right it’s on a sort of hill and you’ve got lovely views looking out to the  South Downs (ICE-GB: s1a-036 #158)

(2)  a.  And the work that I’ve done with him inthe early stages has I think helped alot  (ICE-GB: s1a-003#90)

b.  Your argument I believe is that it‘s died so to speak more in some realms than inothers … (ICE-GB: s1b-028#19)

The prosodic realizations of both type nouns and comment clauses vary with respect to parameters such as prominence (on a scale from prosodically prominent to prosodically weak) and prosodic phrasing (separate – integrated).These different – synchronically coexisting – prosodic realizations correspond to different degrees of grammaticalization. This result provides evidence that desemanticization and erosion proceed hand in hand. Their parallel development is attributed to the demands of iconicity rather than to frequency effects.

References

Dehé,Nicole. 2018. The prosodic phrasing of parenthetical comment clauses inspontaneous spoken language: Evidence from Icelandic held ég. Studia Linguistica 72(1): 128-164.

Dehé, Nicole& Katerina Stathi. 2016. Grammaticalization and prosody: the case of English sort/kind/type of constructions. Language92(4): 911-947.

Dehé, Nicole & Anne Wichmann. 2010. The multifunctionality of epistemic parentheticals in discourse: prosodic cues to the semantic-pragmatic boundary. Functions of Language 17(1): 1-28.

Zhao, Lucy, Nicole Dehé & Victoria A. Murphy. 2018. From pitch to purpose: The prosodic-pragmatic mapping of [I + verb] belief constructions in English and Mandarin. Journalof Pragmatics 123: 57-77.