Palestra 01
- Título
- Morphemes-like prosodic functions
- Palestrantes
- Dr. Yi Xu (University College London, UK)
- Dra. Fang Liu (Stanford University, USA)
- Resumo
- How prosody is linked to meaning is a long-standing issue. This lecture explores the idea that prosodic functions such as focus, sentence modality, and boundary marking are analogous to lexical morphemes, the smallest sound units that carry meaning. Four lines of evidence are presented. First, similar to lexical morphemes, each prosodic function may consist of multiple phonetic components. Focus involves on-focus increase of pitch range, duration, intensity, and high-frequency energy as well as post-focus decrease of F0 and intensity. Sentence modality is marked not only by sentence-final F0, but also by changes in pre-final F0 and sometimes in local pitch targets as well. Boundary marking involves final lengthening, pausing, initial strengthening, and possibly boundary tones. Second, like segmental phonemes, individual prosodic components are meaningless themselves but act jointly to mark both intra- and inter-functional contrasts. Third, like lexical morphemes, prosodic functions have allomorph-like variants whose occurrences are conditioned by factors like location in sentence and interaction with other prosodic functions. Finally, similar to lexical morphemes, prosodic functions are language-specific with possible historical sources. The latter is suggested by recent findings that both focus and question intonation have distinctly language-family-specific prosodic patterns.
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