New prosodic patterns in Catalan: Information status and (de)accentability

Forcadell, Montserrat

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2016.03.007

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Preprint 41 more important role of prosody in information status marking has been suggested before (by Forcadell, 2016 for Catalan and, among many others, Rasier et al, 2010 for French), the similarity in the distribution of accents (in fact, the relatively large number of deaccentuations)…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…Nevertheless, a series of empirical studies on different varieties of Catalan and Spanish have demonstrated that prosodic marking of focus in situ is possible in these languages (e.g., Feldhausen et al, 2010;Vanrell & Fernández-Soriano, 2013). In that sense, a study on spontaneous Catalan spotted previously unattested patterns such as the accentuation of a non-final element or an element pertaining to the domain of the common ground and points out the use of more strictly prosody-based strategies for the expression of information structure (Forcadell, 2016).…”

Section: Prosodic Marking Of Information Statusmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Prosody and head gestures as markers of information status in French as a native and foreign language

Baills,

Baumann

2024

Preprint

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Prosody and gesture are known as two possible cues to express information structure in a native language. Applying this potentially multimodal form-meaning relation to a foreign language may be difficult for learners. The present study investigates how native speakers and language learners use prosodic prominence and head gestures to distinguish distinct levels of givenness. Twenty-five Catalan learners of French and 19 French native speakers were video recorded during a short narrative task. The recordings were annotated in terms of information status, pitch accents, perceived prominence, and head gesture types. Results show that as a multimodal cue, head gestures merely support pitch accents, which were the most common markers of information status. Furthermore, both native and non-native French speakers perceived new and accessible information as more prominent than given information and more frequently marked the former with pitch accents alone or with a combination of pitch accents and head gestures. Somewhat surprisingly, this outcome resembles the distribution in West Germanic languages. Nevertheless, we found a slightly more differentiated use of accent types in native French, whereas Catalan learners of French made less clear distinctions between information status levels, for example by marking given information by accents to a larger extent.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Section: Prosodic Marking Of Information Statusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody and head gestures as markers of information status in French as a native and foreign language

Baills,

Baumann

2024

Preprint

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“…While most ready-made corpora are highly representative of the genres they aim to represent, some may suffer from a lack of representatives, particularly in areas outside of corpus linguistics such as pragmatics. As a result, many researchers in this field have turned to using conversations from popular media such as sitcoms (e.g., Forcadell, 2016; Kim, 2014; Su, 2017), movies (e.g., Ionescu, 2020), and television (e.g., Sinkeviciute & Rodriguez, 2021), etc. as data sources, due to the convenience of data collection and processing, as well as their flexibility in meeting various research objectives.…”

Section: Research Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Sitcom Conversations Fully Depict Those in Natural Settings: A Corpus-Based Lexical Analysis

Li,

Xiao

2024

Sage Open

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An increasing number of studies in pragmatics, second language acquisition, and related fields have opted to use sitcom conversations as a substitute for natural conversations in their analyses. However, few studies have critically examined the validity of this substitution. Taking this into consideration, the present study aims to examine the lexical similarities and differences between sitcom and natural conversations by utilizing the Friends Corpus and the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English as samples under a synthesized analytic framework of six lexical categories that have been frequently examined in previous research. The findings indicate that there are significant differences between sitcom and natural conversations at the lexical level, particularly in terms of word lengths, keywords, and the use of discourse markers, personal pronouns, vocatives, and religious words. While sitcom conversations tend to be more concise, interactive, evaluative, and involving, natural conversations provide more explanations for their speech acts and refer to their parties who are not present in the conversations. Additionally, sitcom conversations use more intensifiers and vocatives while using fewer tentative modals, expletives, and religious words. Based on these results, it can be concluded that sitcom conversations do not fully depict the conversations in sitcoms, and thus substituting natural conversations with those in sitcoms should be approached with caution in language teaching and research. This study provides insight into the differences in lexical patterns between two types of conversations, and highlights the importance of using natural conversations as a basis for language teaching and research.

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“…Gogh. (Birner & Ward, 1998, p. 149) As several authors (Forcadell, 2016;Mayol, 2007;Vallduví, 1992) highlight, dislocation in English is not particularly common, since this language mainly resorts to prosodic means to encode different informative values. This fact makes English utterances less transparent in the syntactic encoding of information structure, which renders experimental testing more difficult.…”

Section: Left and Right Dislocationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bridging Strength, Monotonicity, and Word Order Choices in Catalan

Brunetti

Mayol

Villalba

2020

Discourse Processes

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Three experimental studies are presented testing the choice of a left or a right dislocation in Catalan, depending on the bridging relation between the dislocate and its antecedent. We make the hypothesis that the stronger the anaphoric link between the dislocate and its antecedent, the more appropriate a right dislocation is, while the opposite is true for left dislocation. The results of two acceptability judgment experiments partially support our hypothesis: Ratings with right dislocation decrease proportionally to the strength of the anaphoric link; however, it is ratings of canonical sentences (without dislocation at all), rather than of left dislocation, that display the opposite direction. For left dislocation, the picture is more complex and reflects the pragmatic function of this construction as a topic shifter or marker of contrast. A third experiment tests the monotonicity hypothesis, according to which a left dislocation is chosen when the anaphoric relation with the antecedent is either downward monotonic or non-monotonic, while a right dislocation is preferred with an upward monotonic relation. The results partially support such hypothesis, but they also further support the importance of taking the pragmatic function of left dislocation into account to explain its choice in discourse by speakers.

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New prosodic patterns in Catalan: Information status and (de)accentability

Cited by 4 publications

References 26 publications

Prosody and head gestures as markers of information status in French as a native and foreign language

Prosody and head gestures as markers of information status in French as a native and foreign language

Do Sitcom Conversations Fully Depict Those in Natural Settings: A Corpus-Based Lexical Analysis

Bridging Strength, Monotonicity, and Word Order Choices in Catalan

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