This study concerns the role of prosody in the structuring of information in monologue discourse, from the point of view of production as well as perception. Two prosodic variables were investigated: speech melody and pauses. Melodically, it was found that local intonation features (falling vs. rising tones) are employed to indicate discourse boundaries. On a more global level, speakers appear to use relative height of pitch peaks and of average pitch values as markers of information units. Furthermore, speakers manipulate both the distribution of pauses and their relative length to mark information flow. A perception experiment was carried out to evaluate the perceptual impact of both speech melody and pauses. It was found that, in the absence of semantic cues, both melodic and pausal information is used by listeners to process the incoming signal in terms of discourse structure.
and Key Results■ Often one of the main problems faced in global teams is that one or more of the team members will need to use a foreign language. This can cause communication difficulties and hinder the performance of global teams. ■ We discsuss in this paper how research in linguistics can help further research on these difficulties in global teams, giving examples of different types of challenges and their implications. Linguistic analysis can enrich our theories about global team management and improve management practice of global teams.
This paper addresses the linguistic realization of the face-threatening act of ‘complaints’ in native and non-native French discourse. Data were obtained through written Discourse Completion Tasks with German learners of French and native speakers to examine the extent to which L1 complaint strategies differ from L2 ones, the extent to which differences can be attributed to transfer from the L1, and the extent to which complaint behaviour is gender specific. While no direct evidence of pragmatic transfer from the L1 was found, significant differences were found between L1 and L2 in utterance lengths, degree of directness, use of supportive moves, and appearance of downgraders. Some gender specific features were also found.
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