When Pragmatics Meets Prosody (Discovering what text means to the speaker)

Magdaléna Bilá, Alena Kačmárová

A monograph falling in the field of pragmatics

The first part explains and interprets key notions and concepts: a communication act, intentionality as part of modal meaning multimodality of film dialogue, tonic stress. The research part tackles and analyzes communication functions and illocutionary acts in the target discourse (an episode from the sitcom Friends). The third part deals with the location of tonic stress in the utterances within the identified communication functions and illocutionary acts. The conclusive part points at the interface between pragmatics and prosody in pre-scripted text.

Learn more – browse: The Contents Introduction Conclusion Info on accessibility

THE CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES

INTRODUCTION

1 THE FRAMEWORK OF THE STUDY 1.1 AN OVERVIEW OF THE NOTIONS EMPLOYED 1.2 A COMMUNICATION ACT

1.2.1 An Introductory Note 1.2.2 The Period of “Philosophical” Pragmatics 1.2.3 The Period of “Linguistic” Pragmatics

1.3 INTENTIONALITY AS PART OF MODAL MEANING 1.4 MULTIMODALITY OF A FILM DIALOGUE

1.4.1 Auditory and Visual Facets 1.4.2 Spoken and Written Facets 1.4.3 Film Dialogue in the Sitcom Genre

1.5 DEFINING TONIC STRESS

2 COMMUNICATION FUNCTIONS AND ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS IN PRE-SCRIPTED TEXT 2.1 COMMUNICATION FUNCTIONS OF UTTERANCES

2.1.1 An Introductory Note on Communication Functions 2.1.2 The Analysis of Communication Functions

2.2 ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS 2.2.1 An Introductory Note 2.2.2 The Analysis of Illocutionary Acts

3 TONIC STRESS IN PRE-SCRIPTED TEXT

4 THE INTERFACE BETWEEN PRAGMATICS AND PROSODY IN PRE-SCRIPTED TEXT 4.1 PROSODY AND COMMUNICATION FUNCTIONS 4.2 PROSODY AND ILLOCUTIONARY FORCES

4.2.1 Non-neutral Utterances within Illocutionary Forces 4.2.2 Tonic Stress Patterns within Non-neutral Utterances

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

APPENDIX APPENDIX A: THE TRANSCRIPT OF THE ORIGINAL VERSION APPENDIX B: THE ANALYSIS IN TERMS OF COMMUNICATION FUNCTIONS APPENDIX C: THE ANALYSIS IN TERMS OF ILLOCUTIONARY FORCES

C.1 Referential communication function C.2 Emotive communication function C.3 Conative communication function C.4 Phatic communication function

APPENDIX D: PRAGMATICS-PROSODY INTERFACE – THE ANALYSIS D.1 Referential communication function D.2 Emotive communication function D.3 Conative communication function

APPENDIX E: ILLOCUTIONARY FORCES VS. TONIC STRESS PATTERNS

INTRODUCTION

The primary source for studying and researching language performance is the present-day state of the art of language, its everyday use, typically in the form of a dialogue. Already Levinson (1983: 284) considered conversation to be an adequate research resource since conversation:

… may be taken to be that familiar predominant kind of talk in which two or more participants freely alternate in speaking, which generally occurs outside specific institutional settings like religious services, law courts, classrooms and the like. […] Various aspects of pragmatic organization can be shown to be centrally organized around usage in conversation …

Conversation is a source of many communication situations; hence it is an ample illustration of verbal and nonverbal behavior. Mostly dialogic nature of interaction in a speech event provides opportunities for contemplating a variety of means contributing to the transfer of meaning.

Any communication act represents a communication network involving several components in interaction. At the very beginning of a communication activity is the addresser’s intention encoded in a form consistent with the grammar of one’s language and realized in a specific mode (spoken or written). With a particular need in mind the addresser transmits a message converted into a particular code to the addressee who decodes the message using the same code. Such interaction is placed in broader societal and cultural context and reflects participants’ knowledge and experience (pragmatic context). Encoding mirrors immediate intratextual context. If the addressee decodes the utterance correctly, they achieve conceptualization.

Modern linguistic research tends to pay attention to the concept of meaning that is formed by the combination of linguistic, social and cultural backgrounds. This is so because only contextually defined meaning can serve as a means of proper interpretation of an utterance and can elicit an accurate response. Meaning per se seems to be a trans-disciplinary notion as it can be associated with lexicology (i.e. word meaning), with semantics (i.e. sentence meaning), and with pragmatics (i.e. utterance meaning). Each type of meaning has its function and a share of significance in understanding linguistic and extra-linguistic reality. However, it is pragmatic meaning that serves as a guide to comprehending the communication situation as it discloses a speaker’s communicative intention, a speaker’s mindset.

Pragmatics operates with so-called invisible meaning that is expressed through the immediate linguistic context and through physical context; moreover, it implies meaning hiding in the mind of speakers. In a speech event, it is not exclusively decisive what the uttered words mean; it is important what a speaker means or intends to convey and do by uttering them. In pragmatics, meaning is speaker-oriented, it is derivable from a communication situation, and it shapes the participants’ interaction. If the communicative intention of a speaker goes undetected, the result is a failure in the meaning transfer. Participants of communication are a necessary part of a communication act in that the communication act influences their nonverbal and verbal behavior.

Verbal conduct can be understood as a multidimensional phenomenon. Even though words, phrases, and sentences are seemingly organized in a linear way and remind us of a chain, the ideas expressed do not bear identical value or significance. Austin’s most valuable contribution was the idea that anything we say at once has a particular meaning and

represents a particular activity; hence the utterance has a particular force. It follows that an utterance is attributed a certain message which is reflected in the subsequent activity. This message is, as a matter of fact, the illocutionary force of the utterance. The detection of the illocutionary force, i.e. of pragmatic meaning of utterances in a speech event makes the transfer of ideas meaningful and purposeful. Each illocutionary act contributes its own sense that through the cooperation of interactants gets communicated.

Our focus is audio-visual text, a film dialogue reflecting a conversational routine of a particular contextually embedded language. The discourse selected for the contemplation is the conversational interaction in the sitcom Friends, specifically in the episode The One When No One Proposes (Episode 1, Season IX, 2002/03). The synopsis of the episode is as follows: Rachel is in the post-delivery room; she just gave birth to baby Emma. In the room, Joey looks for some tissues for Rachel, picks up Ross’s jacket, and an engagement ring falls to the floor. He kneels to pick it up and turns to Rachel, still on his knees and still holding the ring. Rachel thinks this is his proposal of marriage and accepts. In the rest of the episode, Joey strives to explain the misunderstanding (Friends, online).

The book presents the research aiming to look into how actual speakers/actors interpret pre-scripted text in terms of vocal realization and how they interpret the intentionality of the text (on intentionality, cf Widdowson, 2004). The research question is what the pre-scripted text means to its speakers both pragmatically and vocally. The research plan consists of three steps: 1/ the identification of communication functions in the target language material, 2/ the identification of tonic stress patterns in the target language material, and 3/ the interrelation of tonic stress patterns and communication functions. Hence our discussion focuses on the interface between pragmatics and prosody in pre-scripted text.

In the course of conducting research, we adhere to the following terms: an utterance, a sentence and a turn. In our understanding, an utterance embodies a modification of a sentence (syntactic construct), a situationally and contextually determined attainment of a speaker’s communicative intention delimited by speakers’ swap (Crystal – Davy, 1973, Yule, 1996). A sentence signifies a detached, independent structure (with or without a predicate), relatively non-compositional in meaning, intonationally delimited, and with grammar-consistent word ordering (Oravec – Bajzíková, 1986). A turn represents a non-propositional unit of a dialogic structure (Bosák – Camutaliová, 1967). The structure of the book is as follows. The first chapter explains the key notions employed: a communication act, multimodality of a film dialogue, intentionality as part of modal meaning, and tonic stress placement as a communication strategy. The second chapter discusses communication functions and illocutionary acts in pre-scripted text; it presents an analysis of the target discourse with regard to illocutionary forces within three major communication functions. The third chapter deals with tonic stress in pre-scripted text; it offers the analysis in terms of tonic stress patterns – neutral and non-neutral (within the latter those of broad tonic stress, marked tonic stress placement, and the combined type). The fourth chapter points to the pragmatics-prosody interface in that it provides the analysis of the interlinkage between firstly, prosody and communication functions, and secondly, between prosody and illocutionary forces. The discussion is supplemented by Appendices providing for the analyses the outcomes of which are presented in the main text.

CONCLUSION

Conversation is a number one source of linguistic and non-linguistic behavior contemplation. The rhetorical mode of the focal discourse echoes the verbal performance traceable to oral communication. The setting of the selected discourse is the environment shared by friends and family members. Features typical of such an environment are a dialogic mode of speech, frequent turn change and change of speakers, spontaneity (though pretend), expressive intonation, rapid speech tempo, and slightly exaggerated nonverbal communication (at least from a viewpoint of a Slovak user of English). A film dialogue, a type of audio-visual text, embodies concurrent employment of two communication channels, i.e. simultaneous transmission of two sets of signs (verbal and non-verbal). It is created with ambition to give the illusion of natural/idiomatic linguistic and non-linguistic behavior.

Research studies have shown that sitcom discourse does not bear all the features of spontaneous conversation; even so some semblance might be observed. At the phonetic level (Romero Fresco, 2009, online pdf document, p. 46), sitcom may be characterized by standard pronunciation, i.e. careful articulation, avoidance of inappropriate pauses and prosodic ambiguity as well as an excessive occurrence of simultaneous speech of several characters, all of which represent effort to achieve illocutionary transparency. At morphological and syntactic levels, in sitcom the degree of syntactic in/completeness or fragmentation and deviation from norms seems to be lesser than in spontaneous speech. And, finally, at the lexical level, high information load, avoidance of excessive alteration of topics and redundancy may be observed (Romero Fresco, 2009).

The target discourse in its very nature is pre-scripted text interpreted by an actor. An actor mediates the author’s ideas to the viewers in the way that s/he finds purposeful and appropriate. Since it is hard to judge the author’s intent, a viewer can recognize the intentionality of the text mainly through the actors’ performance on vocal and pragmatic levels. The objective of our research was to arrive at how actors vocally deal with the text that is primarily written, only secondarily interpreted through actual acting out and through recognizing the intentionality of the text. The discourse selected for the contemplation was conversational interaction in the sitcom Friends, specifically in the episode The One When No One Proposes (Episode 1, Season IX, 2002/03).

In the studied language material, we identified 306 turns and 479 utterances that were further explored. In the target source, utterances with 5 communication functions occurred – referential (56.79%), emotive (28.81%), conative (10.65%), phatic (1.875%), and phatic-emotive (1.875%). During the analysis on the selected suprasegmental we observed 46.76% utterances with neutral and 53.24% utterances with non-neutral tonic stress patterns. Within the latter, in 31.37% of utterances broad tonic stress was present, in 23.92% utterances marked tonic stress placement was noticed, and in 44.71% utterances combined type was used. The interrelation of the two analyses reveals that the observed prosodic trait was present in utterances with three communication functions – referential, emotive, and conative.

A further analysis in terms of identifying illocutionary forces dealt with three communication functions since phatic and emotive-phatic were scarcely represented in the target discourse. In a conative CF we identified 16 illocutionary forces (IFs) and the lowest number of utterances per IF – hence it seems to be the most varied CF. In an emotive CF, we identified 25 IFs and similarly to the conative CF a low number of utterances per IF. In a referential CF, we observed 24 IFs and the highest mean number of utterances per IF – for this reason it seems to be the least varied CF.

As Widdowson (2004: 37) claims, “[t]he meaning of the utterance is contextually dependent.” Identifying illocutionary forces did not happen by chance; on the contrary it was governed by this idea mentioned above. The examples provided can make impression of sentences isolated from the situational and other context, and void of paralinguistic features. However, the analysis presented is the reflection of their being contextually bound and conveying interactive features. Accounting for interactiveness was the key criterion in identifying illocutionary forces. The target discourse interpretation took into consideration the meaning generated in the context of communication situation transferred into the account presented.

The analysis into pragmatics-prosody interface in the target corpus of pre-scripted text unveiled that tonic stress as one of the constituents of intonation greatly assists in communicating how a speaker interprets text, in other words what text means to the speaker. In our corpus, the number of non-neutral tonic stress patterns exceeded neutral ones. This was observed in the IFs of referential and conative CFs; surprisingly, this was not the case in the IFs of the emotive CF – apparently this is due to a speaker’s preference for other than prosodic linguistic means. The most often used pattern was the combined type (broad tonic stress and marked tonic stress placement at a time). Turning to Widdowson (2004: 10) again, “[m]aking sense of a spoken interaction from the insider point of view of participants is very different from making sense of it as an outsider third person transcribing it.” This is well applicable to real conversation; however, the target discourse is a little distinct from this view. Pre-scripted text triggers certain expectations that help predict the make-up of the conversation. In addition, in this context, an actor plays the role of a mediator in that s/he makes available the authors’ intentionality.

When Pragmatics Meets Prosody (Discovering what text means to the speaker)

Magdaléna Bilá, Alena Kačmárová

A monograph falling in the field of pragmatics

The first part explains and interprets key notions and concepts: a communication act, intentionality as part of modal meaning multimodality of film dialogue, tonic stress. The research part tackles and analyzes communication functions and illocutionary acts in the target discourse (an episode from the sitcom Friends). The third part deals with the location of tonic stress in the utterances within the identified communication functions and illocutionary acts. The conclusive part points at the interface between pragmatics and prosody in pre-scripted text. Publishing house: MSD Brno, 2013 Order at: www.martinus.sk or www.martinus.cz Estimated shipping time 11 days Details

150 pages paperback language: English ISBN 9788073922139

The reviewers wrote: The book provides a systematic survey of how human communication makes particular units of information more prominent. A novelty of the study consists in emphasizing a non-trivial feature of information structuring ... that communication functions determine and modulate the deployment of suprasegmentals on the utterance level. Prof. László Imre KOMLÓSI, PhD, Dr.h.c., Dpt of English Linguistics, Institute of English Studies, University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary The monograph is a highly enlightening reading and analysis of pre-scripted text based on one episode of a popular sitcom Friends. Such a thorough analysis of text and a close scrutiny of functions testifies to impressive linguistic expertise and dedication of the authors of the monograph. Dr hab., Prof. UR Agnieszka UBERMAN, Institute of English Studies, University of Rzeszów, Rzeszów, Poland In the present research study, the authors opted for a bumpy road in their search for interdisciplinary causality, which requires quite some expertise and creativity. The authors have set a crystal-clear research plan that made it possible to arrive at the answer to a challenging research question of what a pre-scripted text means to its speakers both pragmatically and vocally. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zdena KRÁLOVÁ, PhD., Dpt of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities, University of Žilina, Žilina, Slovak Republic