'It's Five O'Clock' – Microprosody and Enunciation
15 Pages Posted: 18 Feb 2015
Date Written: February 17, 2015
Abstract
Based on an enunciation-mode system previously found in the semantics of Romance subjunctives, a hypothesis on crosslinguistic prosodic manifestations of enunciation modes is developed and tested in a pilot project using theater students pronouncing a neutral sentence with enunciational variations prompted by different contexts. The sentence-final syllable pitch profile varied significantly. In our exploratory study, the variation of these profiles corresponded tendentially to the variation of the mode of enunciation (volitive, imaginative, intellective, affective). A semantic pattern of four significant enunciation values may thus have been detected, at least in American English sentence-final microprosody.
Keywords: Enunciation, micro-prosody, mood, syllabic pitch profiles
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