We are happy to announce the next talk in the Phonology Colloquium by Pia Bergmann (U Jena). Abstract below.
The talk will take place online. However, we will have the hybrid kit working in the seminar room as well. If you are registered in Olat you’ll find the Zoom link there. If you want to participate via zoom, please register via email to Alina Gregori: gregori@lingua.uni-frankfurt.de
Title: The prosody of discourse markers – Prosodic prominence on the level of discourse
Date: January 19, 2022
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Place: Online Zoom / IG 4.301 (hybrid setting)
Everybody is coridially invited!
Abstract:
The prosody of discourse markers – Prosodic prominence on the level of discourse
Pia Bergmann (pia.bergmann@uni.jena.de)
The talk deals with the prosody of so-called discourse markers in contemporary German, which are often placed in the context of grammaticalization or pragmaticalization processes (cf. Auer & Günthner 2005). While on the one hand it is assumed that grammaticalization processes are or at least can be accompanied by phonetic reductions (cf. Heine & Kuteva 2007), on the other hand Wichman (2011) emphasises that phonetic reductions are preceded by those on the prosodic level. According to her, the prosodic reduction goes hand in hand with the loss of semantic prominence that an element experiences as a discourse marker. At the same time, however, studies show that a semantically bleached, discourse-related use can lead to a prosodic strengthening, including prominence and separate phrasing (cf. for example Ferrara (1997) on “anyway”). There is a lack of clarity in previous research, among other things, about which semantic and pragmatic usages lead to a prosodic weakening or even to a prosodic strengthening and how these in turn are related to phonetic reductions.
On the basis of a study of ca. 250 instances of jedenfalls and auf jeden Fall (‘certainly’ – ‘anyway’), the present paper sheds a light on the prominence of discourse markers in spontaneous German speech. It will be argued that jedenfalls and auf jeden Fall display prosodic prominence as a case of chunking prominence on the level of discourse. It will furthermore be suggested that – despite the prosodic strengthening of the discourse markers – phonetic reductions indeed do occur. The data are taken from the FOLK corpus (DGD, IDS Mannheim). Prosodic annotations are carried out in Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2013) on the basis of DIMA (Kügler & Baumann 2019). The pragmatic analysis is couched in the framework of Interactional Linguistics (Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 2018).
Literature
Auer, Peter & Günthner, Susanne (2005): Die Entstehung von Diskursmarkern im Deutschen – ein Fall von Grammatikalisierung? In: Leuschner, Torsten, Mortelmans, Tanja, de Groodt, Sarah (Hrsg.): Grammatikalisierung im Deutschen. Berlin: de Gruyter, 335-360.
Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (2013): Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2013). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Retrieved from http://www.praat.org/.
Couper-Kuhlen, E., Selting, M. (2018): Interactional linguistics. Cambridge: CUP.
DGD, Datenbank für gesprochenes Deutsch (https://dgd.ids-mannheim.de/dgd/pragdb.dgd_extern.welcome)
Ferrara, Kathleen W. (1997): Form and function of the discourse marker anyway: implications for discourse analysis. Linguistics 35, 343-378.
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania (2007): The genesis of grammar. A reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kügler, F., Baumann, S. (2019): DIMA – Annotationsrichtlinien Version 4.0. (https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/9790/)
Wichmann, Anne (2011): Grammaticalization and prosody. In: Narrog, Heiko & Heine, Bernd (Hrsg.): The Oxford handbook of grammaticaliziation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 331-341.