Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T20:36:54.838Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Clausal parentheticals, intonational phrasing, and prosodic theory1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 September 2009

NICOLE DEHÉ
NICOLE DEHÉ*
Affiliation:
Freie UniversitätBerlin
*
Author's address: Institut für Englische Philologie, FU Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, 14195 Berlin, Germanyndehe@zedat.fu-berlin.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper investigates the intonational phrasing of three types of parenthetical insertions – non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs), full sentences, and comment clauses (CCs) – in actual spoken language. It draws on a large set of data from a corpus of spoken British English. Its aim is twofold: first, it evaluates the correctness of previous claims about the intonational phrasing of parentheticals, specifically the assumption that parentheticals are phrased in a separate intonation domain; second, it discusses the implications of the intonational phrasing of parentheticals for prosodic theory. The results of the data analysis are as follows. First, the longer types of interpolations but not CCs are by default phrased separately. Second, both the temporal and the tonal structure of the host may be affected by the parenthetical. Third, CCs lend themselves more readily to the restructuring of intonational phrases such that they are phrased in one domain together with material from the host. Fourth, the prosodic results cannot be explained in syntactic accounts which do not allow for a syntactic relation between parenthetical and host. Fifth, the interface constraints on intonational phrasing apply to parentheticals. Sixth, the intonational phrasing of parentheticals supports the assumption of a post-syntactic, phonological component of the grammar at which restructuring applies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , November 2009 , pp. 569 - 615
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[1]

I have benefitted from discussion of the work presented here with many people. Thanks are due to the audiences at the Workshop on Parenthesis and Sentence Amalgamation held at the University of Groningen in October 2007, and at the 2nd Prosody–Syntax Workshop (PSI 2) held at ZAS, Berlin, in June 2008; to Anne Wichmann for discussion and numerous native-speaker judgments; to my colleagues in the Berlin/Potsdam area: Laura Downing, Ingo Feldhausen, Sam Hellmuth, Shin Ishihara, Hubert Truckenbrodt and Cedric Patin; to colleagues elsewhere: Jelena Krivokapić, Aditi Lahiri, Frans Plank and Mark de Vries; and to the students attending the course Syntax III – Parentheticals in English, held at the University of Konstanz, summer 2008. I am particularly grateful to Lisa Selkirk and to one other, anonymous reviewer for the Journal of Linguistics for their extensive and insightful comments, as well as to the proofreader for JL. The work presented here has benefitted greatly from the International Corpus of English and accompanying software. ICE-GB is coordinated by the Survey of English Usage, University College London. For more information, consult the following website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice-gb/.

References

REFERENCES

Ackema, Peter & Neeleman, Ad. 2004. Beyond morphology: Interface conditions on word formation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aijmer, Karin. 1997. I think – an English modal particle. In Swan, Toril & Westvik, Olaf Jansen (eds.), Modality in Germanic languages: Historical and comparative perspective, 1–47. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Altmann, Hans. 1981. Formen der “Herausstellung” im Deutschen: Rechtsversetzung, Linksversetzung, Freies Thema und verwandte Konstruktionen (Linguistische Arbeiten 106). Tübingen: Niemeyer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armstrong, Lilias E. & Ward, Ida C.. 1926. A handbook of English intonation. Cambridge: Heffer & Sons.Google Scholar
Arnold, Doug. 2007. Non-restrictive relatives are not orphans. Journal of Linguistics 43.2, 271–309.Google Scholar
Astruc, Lluisa. 2005. The intonation of extra-sentential elements in Catalan and English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar. 2007. Prosody, Construction Grammar and language change. In Volk-Birke, Sabine & Lippert, Julia (eds.), Anglistentag 2006, Halle, 423–433. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary E., Hirschberg, Julia & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie. 2005. The original ToBI system and the evolution of the ToBI framework. In Jun, (ed.), 9–54.Google Scholar
Beckman, Mary E. & Pierrehumbert, Janet B.. 1986. Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook 3, 255–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bing, Janet M. 1985. Aspects of English prosody. New York & London: Garland.Google Scholar
Blakemore, Diane. 2005. And-parentheticals. Journal of Pragmatics 37, 1165–1181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul. 2001. Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 5, 341–347.Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David. 2008. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. http://www.praat.org/ (7 January 2008).Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1989. Intonation and its uses: Melody in grammar and discourse. London: Arnold.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burton-Roberts, Noel. 1999. Language, linear precedence and parentheticals. In Collins, Peter & Lee, David (eds.), The clause in English, 33–52. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burton-Roberts, Noel. 2006. Parentheticals. In Brown, Keith (ed.), Encyclopaedia of language and linguistics, 2nd edn., vol. 9, 179–182. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Kenstowicz, Michael (ed.), Ken Hale: A life in language, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 2004. On phases. Ms., MIT.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 2005. The factors in language design. Linguistic Inquiry 36.1, 1–22.Google Scholar
Cooper, William E. & Paccia-Cooper, Jeanne. 1980. Syntax and speech. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, William & Sorensen, John. 1981. Fundamental frequency in sentence production. Heidelberg: Springer.Google Scholar
Corver, Norbert & Thiersch, Craig. 2002. Remarks on parentheticals. In Oostendorp, Marc van & Anagnostopoulou, Elena (eds.), Progress in grammar: Articles at the 20th Anniversary of the Comparison of Grammatical Models Group in Tilburg. http://www.meertens.knaw.nl/books/progressingrammar/ (7 January 2008).Google Scholar
Cruttenden, Alan. 1997. Intonation, 2nd edn.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Crystal, David. 1969. Prosodic systems and intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Crystal, David. 1972. The intonation system of English. In Bolinger, Dwight (ed.), Intonation: Selected readings, 110–136. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
D'Avis, Franz Josef. 2005. Über Parenthesen. In D'Avis, (ed.), 259–279.Google Scholar
D'Avis, Franz Josef(ed.) 2005a. Deutsche Syntax: Empirie und Theorie. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar
Dehé, Nicole. 2007. The relation between syntactic and prosodic parenthesis. In Dehé, & Kavalova, (eds.), 261–284.Google Scholar
Dehé, Nicole. 2008. To delete or not to delete: The contexts of Icelandic final vowel deletion. Lingua 118.5, 732–753.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole & Kavalova, Yordanka. 2006. The syntax, pragmatics and prosody of parenthetical what. English Language & Linguistics 10.2, 289–320.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole & Kavalova, Yordanka. 2007. Parentheticals: An introduction. In Dehé, & Kavalova, (eds.), 1–22.Google Scholar
Dehé, Nicole & Kavalova, Yordanka (eds.). 2007a. Parentheticals (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 106). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole & Wichmann, Anne. To appear. The multifunctionality of epistemic parentheticals in discourse: Prosodic cues to the semantic–pragmatic boundary. Functions of Language.Google Scholar
D'Imperio, Mariapaola, Elordieta, Gorka, Frota, Sónia, Prieto, Pilar & Vigário, Marina. 2005. Intonational phrasing in Romance: The role of syntactic and prosodic structure. In Frota, et al. (eds.), 59–97.Google Scholar
Downing, Bruce T. 1970. Syntactic structure and phonological phrasing in English. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Elordieta, Gorka, Frota, Sónia & Vigário, Marina. 2005. Subjects, objects and intonational phrasing in Spanish and Portuguese. Studia Linguistica 59.2/3, 110–143.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joseph E. 1973. Parenthetical clauses. In Corum, Claudia, Smith-Stark, Cedrik & Weiser, Ann (eds.), You take the high node and I'll take the low node, 333–347. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joseph E. 1976. A transformational approach to English syntax: Root, structure-preserving, and local transformations. New York, San Francisco & London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Emonds, Joseph E. 1979. Appositive relatives have no properties. Linguistic Inquiry 10.2, 211–243.Google Scholar
Espinal, M. Teresa. 1991. The representation of disjunct constituents. Language 67.4, 726–762.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fabb, Nigel. 1990. The difference between English restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses. Journal of Linguistics 26.1, 57–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fagyal, Zsuzsanna. 2002. Prosodic boundaries in the vicinity of utterance-medial parentheticals in French. Probus 14.1, 93–111.Google Scholar
Ferreira, Fernanda. 1991. Effects of length and syntactic complexity on initiation times for prepared utterances. Journal of Memory and Language 30, 210–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, Fernanda. 1993. Creation of prosody during sentence production. Psychological Review 100.2, 233–253.Google Scholar
Frazier, Lyn, Clifton, Charles Jr. & Carlson, Katy. 2004. Don't break, or do: Prosodic boundary preferences. Lingua 114, 3–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frota, Sónia. 2000. Prosody and focus in European Portuguese: Phonological phrasing and intonation. New York & London: Garland.Google Scholar
Frota, Sónia, Vigário, Marina & Freitas, Maria J. (eds.). 2005. Prosodies: With special reference to Iberian languages. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gee, James P. & Grosjean, François. 1983. Performance structures: A psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal. Cognitive Psychology 15, 411–458.Google Scholar
Ghini, Mirco. 1993. Phi-formation in Italian: A new proposal. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics 12, 41–78.Google Scholar
Grewendorf, Günther. 1988. Aspekte der deutschen Syntax: Eine Rektions–Bindungs–Analyse. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 1990. Tonal association domains and the prosodic hierarchy in English. In Ramsaran, Susan M. (ed.), Studies in the pronunciation of English. A commemorative volume in honour of A. C. Gimson, 27–37. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2004. The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gussenhoven, Carlos & Rietveld, A. C. M.. 1992. Intonation contours, prosodic structure and preboundary lengthening. Journal of Phonetics 20, 283–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. 1991. Parenthetical adverbials: The radical orphanage approach. In Chiba, Shuki, Ogawa, Akira, Fuiwara, Yasuaki, Yamada, Norio, Koma, Osamu & Yagi, Takao (eds.), Aspects of modern linguistics: Papers presented to Masatomo Ukaji on his 60th birthday, 232–254. Tokyo: Kaitakushi.Google Scholar
Haider, Hubert. 1993. ECP-Etüden: Anmerkungen zur Extraktion aus eingebetteten Verb-Zweit-Sätzen. Linguistische Berichte 145, 185–203.Google Scholar
Haider, Hubert. 2005. Parenthesen – Evidenz aus Bindungsverhältnissen. In D'Avis, (ed.), 281–293.Google Scholar
Hellmuth, Sam. 2008. Prosodic weight and phonological phrasing in Cairene Arabic. Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 40, 97–111.Google Scholar
Hirschberg, Julia. 2004. Pragmatics and intonation. In Horn, Laurence R. & Ward, Gregory (eds.), The handbook of pragmatics, 515–537. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto. 1937. Analytic syntax. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Jun, Sun-Ah. 2003. The effect of phrase length and speech rate on prosodic phrasing. 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 15) (Barcelona, Spain, 2–9 August 2003), 483–486.Google Scholar
Jun, Sun-Ah. 2005. Prosodic typology. In Jun, (ed.), 430–458.Google Scholar
Jun, Sun-Ah (ed.). 2005a. Prosodic typology: The phonology of intonation and phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kaltenböck, Gunther. 2007. Spoken parenthetical clauses in English: A taxonomy. In Dehé, & Kavalova, (eds.), 25–52.Google Scholar
Kavalova, Yordanka. 2007. And-parenthetical clauses. In Dehé, & Kavalova, (eds.), 145–172.Google Scholar
Kiziak, Tanja. 2007. Long extraction or parenthetical insertion? Evidence from judgement studies. In Dehé, & Kavalova, (eds.), 121–144.Google Scholar
Knowles, Gerry. 1991. Prosodic labelling: The problem of tone group boundaries. In Johansson, Stig & Stenström, Anna-Brita (eds.), English computer corpora: Selected papers and research guide (Topics in English Linguistics 3), 149–161. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kratzer, Angelika & Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2007. Phase theory and prosodic spellout: The case of verbs. The Linguistic Review 24, 93–135.Google Scholar
Krivokapić, Jelena. 2007. Prosodic planning: Effects of phrasal length and complexity on pause duration. Journal of Phonetics 35, 162–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 1986. Intonational phrasing: The case for recursive prosodic structure. Phonology Yearbook 3, 311–340.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. Robert. 1996. Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Local, John. 1992. Continuing and restarting. In Auer, Peter & Luzio, Aldo di (eds.), The contextualization of language, 273–296. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCawley, James D. 1982. Parentheticals and discontinuous constituent structure. Linguistic Inquiry 13.1, 91–106.Google Scholar
Murphy, M. Lynne. 1993. Discourse markers and sentential syntax. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 23.1, 163–167.Google Scholar
Nelson, Gerald, Wallis, Sean & Aarts, Bas. 2002. Exploring natural language: Working with the British component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Nespor, Marina & Vogel, Irene. 1986. Prosodic phonology (Studies in Generative Grammar 28). Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Nolan, Francis. 2006. Intonation. In Aarts, Bas & McMahon, April (eds.), The handbook of English linguistics, 433–457. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Payà, Marta. 2003. Prosody and pragmatics in parenthetical insertions in Catalan. Catalan Journal of Linguistics 2, 207–227.Google Scholar
Peters, Jörg. 2006. Syntactic and prosodic parenthesis. 3rd International Conference on Speech Prosody (2–5 May 2006, Dresden), PS4-21-245.Google Scholar
Peterson, Peter. 1999. On the boundaries of syntax. In Collins, Peter & Lee, David (eds.), The clause in English, 229–250. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Peterson, Peter. 2004. Non-restrictive relatives and other non-syntagmatic relations in an LF framework. Presented at LFG 2004, Christchurch, New Zealand.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet. 1980. The phonology and phonetics of English intonation. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet & Hirschberg, Julia. 1990. The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Cohen, Philip R., Morgan, Jerry & Pollack, Martha E. (eds.), Intentions in communication, 271–311. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2002. The syntax and semantics of as-parentheticals. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20.3, 623–689.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Potts, Christopher. 2005. The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Prieto, Pilar. 2005. Syntactic and eurhythmic constraints on phrasing decisions in Catalan. Studia Linguistica 59.2/3, 194–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Reis, Marga. 1995. Wer glaubst du hat recht? On so-called extractions from verb-second clauses and verb-first parenthetical constructions in German. Sprache und Pragmatik 36, 27–83.Google Scholar
Reis, Marga. 2002. Wh-movement and integrated parenthetical constructions. In Zwart, C. Jan-Wouter & Abraham, Werner (eds.), Studies in comparative Germanic syntax: 15th Workshop on Comparative Germanic Syntax (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 53), 3–40. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ross, John R. 1973. Slifting. In Gross, Maurice, Halle, Morris & Schützenberger, Marcel-Paul (eds.), The Formal Analysis of Natural Languages: 1st International Conference, 133–169. The Hague & Paris: Mouton.Google Scholar
Safir, Kenneth. 1986. Relative clauses in a theory of binding and levels. Linguistic Inquiry 17.4, 663–689.Google Scholar
Sandalo, Filomena & Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2002. Some notes on phonological phrasing in Brazilian Portuguese. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 42, 285–310.Google Scholar
Schafer, Amy J., Speer, Shari R., Warren, Paul & White, David S.. 2000. Intonational disambiguation in sentence production and comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 29.2, 169–182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schelfhout, Carla, Coppen, Peter-Arno & Oostdijk, Nelleke. 2004. Finite comment clauses in Dutch: A corpus-based approach. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 14.4, 331–350.Google Scholar
Schneider, Stefan. 2007a. Reduced parenthetical clauses as mitigators: A corpus study of spoken French, Italian and Spanish (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 27). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Stefan. 2007b. Reduced parenthetical clauses in Romance languages: A pragmatic typology. In Dehé, & Kavalova, (eds.), 237–258.Google Scholar
Schubiger, Maria. 1958. English intonation: Its form and function. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1984. Phonology and syntax: The relation between sound and structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1995a. Sentence prosody: Intonation, stress, and phrasing. In Goldsmith, John A. (ed.), The handbook of phonological theory, 550–569. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1995b. The prosodic structure of function words. In Morgan, James E. & Demuth, Katherine (eds.), Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, 187–213. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2000. The interaction of constraints on prosodic phrasing. In Horne, Merle (ed.), Prosody: Theory and experiment, 231–261. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 2005. Comments on intonational phrasing in English. In Frota, et al. (eds.), 11–58.Google Scholar
Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie & Turk, Alice E.. 1996. A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 25, 193–247.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taglicht, Josef. 1998. Constraints on intonational phrasing in English. Journal of Linguistics 34.1, 181–211.Google Scholar
Tappe, Thilo. 1981. Wer glaubst du hat recht? Einige Bemerkungen zur COMP–COMP-Bewegung im Deutschen. In Kohrt, M. & Lenerz, Jürgen (eds.), Sprache: Formen und Strukturen. Akten des 15. Linguistischen Kolloquiums, Münster 1980, Band 1 (Linguistische Arbeiten 98), 203–212. Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A. & Mulac, Anthony. 1991. A quantitative perspective on the grammaticization of epistemic parentheticals in English. In Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Heine, Bernd (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization, vol. 2: Focus on types of grammatical markers (Typological Studies in Language 19.2), 313–329. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Truckenbrodt, Hubert. 2005. A short report on intonation phrase boundaries in German. Linguistische Berichte 203, 273–296.Google Scholar
Urmson, J. O. 1952. Parenthetical verbs. Mind 61, 480–496.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaissière, Jacqueline. 1983. Language-independent prosodic features. In Cutler, Anne & Ladd, D. Robert (eds.), Prosody: Models and measurements, 53–66. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Vries, Mark de. 2005. Coordination and syntactic hierarchy. Studia Linguistica 59.1, 83–105.Google Scholar
Vries, Mark de. 2007. Invisible constituents? Parentheses as B-merged adverbial phrases. In Dehé, & Kavalova, (eds.), 203–234.Google Scholar
Wagner, Michael. 2004. Asymmetries in the syntax and prosody of verb-initial interpolated clauses. In Blaho, Sylvia, Vicente, Luis & Vos, Mark de (eds.), Console XII, 201–215. Leiden: Leiden University.Google Scholar
Warren, Paul, Schafer, Amy J., Speer, Shari R. & White, David S.. 2000. Prosodic resolution of prepositional phrase ambiguity in ambiguous and unambiguous situations. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 99, 5–33.Google Scholar
Watson, Duane & Gibson, Edward. 2004. The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production. Language and Cognitive Processes 19.6, 713–755.Google Scholar
Wells, John C. 2006. English intonation: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wichmann, Anne. 2000. Intonation in text and discourse: Beginnings, middles and ends. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Wichmann, Anne. 2001. Spoken parentheticals. In Aijmer, Karin (ed.), A wealth of English: Studies in honour of Göran Kjellmer, 177–193. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar