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 [2] 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 [2].
Index Terms: final vocatives, prosodic incorporation, syntaxphonology interface
s Beckman, Mary and Pierrehumbert, Janet, “Intonational Structure in Japanese and English”, Phonology Yearbook III, 15–70, 1986. Pierrehumbert, Janet and Hirschberg, Julia, “The Meaning of Intonational Contours in the Interpretation of Discourse”, in Jerry Morgan, Philip Cohen, and Martha Pollack [Eds], Intentions in Communication, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1990.
Cite as: Hock, H.H., Dutta, I. (2010) Prosody vs. syntax: prosodic rebracketing of final vocatives in English. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 931
@inproceedings{hock10_speechprosody,
author={Hans Henrich Hock and Indranil Dutta},
title={{Prosody vs. syntax: prosodic rebracketing of final vocatives in English}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 931}
}