Affirmative constituents in European Portuguese dialogues: Prosodic and pragmatic properties

Abstract

This paper investigates the correlation between the prosodic properties and pragmatic functions of affirmative constituents in adult-adult interactions in European Portuguese (CORAL corpus). 515 affirmative constituents produced in 460 answers, extracted from 11 dialogues between 12 speakers, were analyzed. Results show that: i) sim 'yes', ok and grunts are the most frequent affirmative constituents; ii) sim 'yes' is associated with all the communicative functions analyzed, agreement, auto positive and confirm, ok tends to occur with agreement, and grunts are mainly associated to auto positive; iii) affirmative constituents have different prosodic properties according to their pragmatic function: agreement and confirm show a similar behavior, being auto positive the most distinct function. Agreement and confirm are commonly uttered with (H+)L* L%, whereas auto positive is commonly uttered with L*+H / (L+)H* H%. When affirmative constituents co-occur in the same answer, there are evidences of tone copying between them. Correlations between constituents were also found in the following parameters: energy, pitch mean, maxima and minima, as well as pitch range. As for context-answer pairs, a pitch concord effect is also found between the pairs instruct-agreement and propositional question-confirm, although expressed in different degrees.

Global Analysis of Entrainment in Dialogues

“…While studying affirmative answers in European Portuguese, [3], in the same corpus used in this study, found evidences of pitch concord effects in context-answer pairs with different pragmatic functions. The authors found correlations regarding pitch height between the pairs instruct-agreement and propositional question (yes-no question) -confirm, although expressed in different degrees.…”

Acoustic-prosodic Entrainment in Structural Metadata Events

“…In EP, only two studies have addressed adaptation between speakers, [18], and [19], both using a subset of the same maptask corpus used in this study. [18] found evidences of prosodic correlations (pitch concord effects) between Yes/No-questions and affirmative answers; and [19] found global entrainment expressed in different degrees, since speakers did not entrained with the same partners and in the same features. Results showed that, despite the role speakers were playing (giver or follower), they tended to display more sensitivity to some partners, which may reveal a stronger partner effect than a role effect.…”