3. INFORMATION STRUCTURING: FROM THE FIRST STUDIES
3.6. Prosody and Information Structuring: a problem not yet resolved
a problem not yet resolved
The role and functions of intonation have been discussed thoroughly in different frameworks, therefore it is not necessary to refer to all of them; only some very general and classic studies will be mentioned here, along with all those which mention the relations between Information Structuring and intonation/prosody.
The first question is, of course, can prosodical features be correlated with a significant value, or more precisely, as put by Lacheret-Dujour & Beaugendre (1999: 95), can minimal prosodical features be attributed a functional pertinence?
Often, it seems that the phoneticians and ‘other’ linguists do not manage to find a lot of common points of interest and possible ground for consensus.
The biggest controversy seems to be the extent to which prosodical units can be put into a relationship with units on other levels of description, as assumed by Simon (2004: 3):
En effet, l’obstacle majeur à une meilleure compréhension du fonctionnement de la prosodie en discours réside actuellement dans l’absence d’unités définies de manière systématique et cohérente avec lesquelles mettre la structure prosodique en relation.12
Some French linguists who work on spoken language (Blanche-Benveniste, Morel, Danon-Boileau) take as their point of departure the fact, recognized for a long time (but with different judgements and consequences) that French spoken spontaneous discourse has so many differences in comparison to written language that one could ask the question as to whether they are two poles of the same language or two completely different codes. Besides very important differences on a lexical level that we won’t investigate here, spoken French is characterized by a ‘decondensation of markers’ (Morel, Danon-Boileau 1998: 8), detached constructions etc.
The ‘grammar’ or ‘syntax’ of oral spontaneous French has been studied as such in different frameworks: for example, the works of C. Blanche-Benveniste (GARS), where the data are presented on ‘syntactic grids’ that allow distinction to be made between the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of the clause (Blanche-Benveniste et al. 1979, Blanche-Benveniste 2000, Tiainen-Duvallon
12 Indeed, the major obstacle to a better understanding of the functioning of the prosody in discourse resides in the absence of systematically and coherently defined units to put into relation with the prosodic structure.’
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2002). This approach focuses on syntax which is described as starting from its nucleus, the verbal element, and is presented as a progressive creation in
‘syntactic moulds’ which allow the oral text to be constructed (especially Tiainen-Duvallon 2002: 9–10). Prosody is not studied in this framework.
Another approach to spoken French is proposed by Morel & Danon-Boileau (1998) in Grammaire de l’intonation where both levels, prosody and syntax, have been taken into account.
According to the authors it is not possible to speak about the functions of intonation globally without any other precision, because intonation, taken separately, does not carry any substantive meaning: it corresponds to different cues and only the variations of different features constitute an interpretable data set.
They distinguish between ‘iconic’ and ‘conventional’ values: every cue (pitch, intensity, duration, silent pause) has a basic iconic value and then it can be assigned a conventional value. For example, they claim that the iconic value of a silent pause is to indicate a turning point in an existing framework; a silent pause, when it is longer than 40 cs, has a conventional value and indicates that the previous information has to be taken as a unified thematic set and thus introduces the rhematic part of the paragraph; these authors determine also the functions of pitch range variations, intensity and the possible combinations of these cues etc.
This approach has been criticized on several points: firstly, the supraseg-mental nature that they attribute to the intonation has been opposed by phonological approaches to the prosody. Secondly, as pointed out by Simon 2004, several methodological and theoretical problems are not solved in their approach, such as their coupling of different features that lacks substantiation, the division of pitch range into four levels with an absolute level for each speaker (Simon 2004: 29), and more generally, the presumably universal nature of prosodic features (ibidem: 53). In conclusion to her research on prosody in French discourse, Simon pleads in favour of a relative independence of prosody:
La propriété première de la prosodie est de n’être parfaitement congruente avec aucun plan d’organisation du discours, mais de l’être potentiellement avec tous.13 (ibidem: 346)
Another view is put forward by the researchers of the framework of con-textualization theory (Auer & di Luzio 1992, Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996):
according to them, the ‘sense’ of prosodic features has an indexical nature and must thus be considered together with other signs, like syntax, interactional clues etc.
13 The first characteristic of the prosody is that it is not perfectly congruent with any level of organization of the discourse, but it can be potentially congruent with all levels.
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Intonation in co-occurrence with syntactic, semantic and other locutionary properties is used as a contextualization device in conversational activities to signal the status and contextual presupposition of segments and utterances (Selting 1992: 237).
Contrary to previous approaches, so-called morphological theories do not establish a link between intonational morphemes and a particular value, cf.
Rossi 1999.
As pointed out among others by Chafe (1987) and Lambrecht (1994), different statuses regarding IS have also formal correlates in prosody.
Chafe (1994) has adopted a functional approach to prosodic phenomena by opposing himself to, for example, Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990:
The approach followed / --- / developed out of a different tradition, in which the sounds of language are transcribed in terms of perceived phenomena judged to express significant aspects of function and meaning. (Chafe 1994: 56)
Chafe assigns special features to the pronunciation of different items according to their informational charge:
Those concepts which are already active for the speaker, and which the speaker judges to be active for the hearer as well, are verbalized in a special way, having properties which have often been discussed in terms of ‘old’ or ‘given’
information. The general thing to say is that given concepts are spoken with an attenuated pronunciation. The attenuation involves, at the very least, weak stress.
Typically, though not always, it involves either pronominalization or omission from verbalization altogether. (Chafe 1987: 26)
Although several authors have underlined the importance of prosody in Information Structuring, it is not easy to find comprehensive studies that encompass different aspects of the question. One of the reasons for that must be that it is not easy to find a consensus concerning pertinent features that will be observed and analysed; a second problem is linked to the question about the most adequate level and the degree of precision in analysis. And thirdly there are at most two different approaches concerning the treatment of data: should it be sufficient if we look (or rather listen) at the data as linguists, but using the same means as all other speakers and listeners, i.e without using any technical means, just as any ordinary listener receives the message or would it be more adequate to look only at data which are processed by machines and programs and thus are quantified and measurable? Then another question arise – what are the pertinent features that are to be measured and quantified?
The importance of intonation had also been noted long ago by Praguan linguist F. Daneš who distinguished between primary and secondary functions of intonation. In its primary function, as this term indicates, it functions as a
‘basic device’, in its secondary function, it can be replaced by other means.
According to Daneš, intonation has two primary functions: delimitation and
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discourse structuring. The main secondary function of intonation is modal, i.e.
the characterization of the utterance according to its intention (Daneš 1960: 48).
A.-C. Simon (2004) has investigated the links between prosody and the internal structure of texts: she claims that these two features can have three types of relations: firstly, prosody can confirm the delimitation already established by other means; secondly, prosody can help to establish with more assurance the results of an analysis; thirdly, prosody may be of no help at all, since it cannot be correlated with the results of the analysis.
3.6.1. Detachment constructions and prosody
Given that the treatment of detached constructions in relation to the prosodical features of the speech is still highly problematic in the present framework, no specific analysis of Estonian from this perspective will be proposed in this thesis. The interest towards this domain (more generally towards IS and prosody) is growing among Estonian linguists and some syntactic accounts have been recently attempted (Sahkai, Kalvik & Mihkla 2013a, 2013b, Salveste 2013).
I consider that this aspect provides material for a separate research, taking into account the fact that was pointed out in the previous chapter about the lack of studies on clause prosody in Estonian and other major problems linked to the treatment of prosody and Information Structuring in discourse. Some works can be mentioned that deal with prosody in relation to the detached constituents:
Coveney 2003, Walker 2004, Astruc 2004 (about Catalan), Leonarduzzi &
Herry 2006, Grobet & Simon 2009, Avanzi 2009, Brunetti, Avanzi & Gendrot 2012.
One central problem lies also in the perspective of analysis and the non-communication or incompatibility of theoretical and empirical principles adopted for researches: if a study is carried out from the point of view of a phonetician, it is rarely compatible with pragmatic or syntactic frameworks that the linguists of these domains consider as prerequisites of their research and vice versa: when a pragmatician or syntactician wants to integrate another dimension like prosody in its analysis, it often receives a very critical reception from phoneticians – and most probably, the researchers in other domains are not even informed about these works. Hence, approaches trying to combine the outcome of different research problematics and domains could be fruitful in the future.
M.M.J. Fernandez-Vest has in several of her works drawn attention to this challenge, given that when analysing detached constructions, researchers fre-quently point to the specific prosodic features of these structures, but different approaches often seem incompatible (Fernandez-Vest 2009: 199, 2015: 222–
224). As concerns her proper approach, she considers prosody an essential criterion when identifying, for example, detached constructions (together with discourse particles); more generally, prosody makes it possible to determine the
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enunciative strategy chosen by the speaker as binary strategy 1 (Th-Rh) or binary strategy 2 (Rh-Mn). She points also to the fact that it is of utmost importance to apply the same analytical framework to short and long utterances, which is the condition that makes it possible to investigate the IS in natural speech (Fernandez-Vest 2009: 200).
She has observed about the Sami language and Finnish (interlanguage) spoken by Samis that the discourse is structured primarily by intonation, secondly by discourse particles, whereas the word order comes only in third place (ibidem: 181).
As concerns the approach chosen here, it is assumed that the analyst is able to interpret the prosodical features like any other speaker who participates in the conversation; besides that, due to the lack of a proper methodology it is not possible to present these data as usable for drawing conclusions about the functions of prosody in discourse, so I will only limit my description to the audible data and refer to some studies about other languages: consequently, the examples that are discussed in this thesis were chosen not only by identifying the detached structures in the transcription, but also by carefully listening to the recordings.
These unsolved questions regarding the prosody and its relation to other levels of description certainly provide material for future research.
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