Accent Is Predictable (If You're a Mind-Reader)

Bolinger, Dwight

doi:10.2307/412039

Cited by 384 publications

(179 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Bresnan (1971) suggests that these items are semi-pronouns. As Bolinger (1972) observes, this approach runs the risk of being circular, at least if this label is used as a mere diacritc for not receiving stress. Again, the presupposition that marking those items as given introduces may simply be easy to accommodate: an obvious alternative for 'John's' in (b) would be for instance 'my own'.…”

Section: Inherently Unstressed Elementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Givenness and Locality

Wagner

2006

SALT

103

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Section: Inherently Unstressed Elementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Givenness and Locality

Wagner

2006

SALT

103

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“…Speakers deliberately accentuate or stress certain words (Bolinger, 1972;Cruttenden, 1986;Levelt, 1989). When speakers stress words, they produce them with a higher fundamental frequency; therefore, stressed words are perceived as higher pitched.…”

Section: Spoken Stressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cataphoric Devices in Spoken Discourse

Gernsbacher¹,

Jescheniak²

1995

Cognitive Psychology

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We propose that speakers mark key words with cataphoric devices. Cataphoric devices are counterparts to anaphoric devices: Just as anaphoric devices enable backward reference, cataphoric devices enable forward reference. And just as anaphoric devices mark concepts that have been mentioned before, cataphoric devices mark concepts that are likely to be mentioned again. We investigated two cataphoric devices: spoken stress and the indefinite this. Our experiments demonstrated three ways that concepts marked by cataphoric devices gain a privileged status in listeners' mental representations: Cataphoric devices enhance the activation of the concepts that they mark; cataphoric devices suppress the activation of previously mentioned concepts; and cataphoric devices protect the concepts that they mark from being suppressed by subsequently mentioned concepts.When people communicate, they talk about actions, events, ideas, other people, and a host of topics. We shall refer to these topics as "concepts" in a discourse. Some concepts are introduced but never referred to again; other concepts play a key role in the discourse. Speakers would benefit if those key concepts achieved a privileged status in their listeners' mental representations because speakers could refer to key concepts assured that their listeners could easily access them. Listeners would benefit, too: They could use key concepts as cornerstones when developing their mental representations.In this paper, we propose that speakers mark key concepts with certain discourse devices, what we call cataphoric devices. In this paper, we also demonstrate how concepts marked by cataphoric devices gain a privileged status in the mental representations that listeners build when comprehending discourse. WHAT ARE CATAPHORIC DEVICES?We envision cataphoric devices as counterparts to anaphoric devices. Anaphoric devices enable backward reference. For instance, English speakers use anaphoric devices like the pronoun she or the definite noun phrase the woman to refer to a previously mentioned female. Speakers master the use of anaphoric devices as they are mastering communication.

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“…Understanding this role is a challenge because prosody can communicate many different types of information. For example, pitch accents and prosodic phrasing can communicate information such as discourse structure by signalling which information is given, new, or most salient (Bolinger, 1972;Dahan, Tanenhaus, & Chambers, 2002;Gussenhoven, 2002;Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990;Schafer, 1997;Selkirk, 1984;Steedman, 2000;Terken & Nooteboom, 1987). At the same time, prosody can signal a sentence's syntactic structure, evidenced by listeners' use of prosody to determine the intended interpretation of syntactically ambigous sentences (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%