Parentheticals in Spoken English: The Syntax-Prosody Relation (Studies in English Language)

Dehé, Nicole

ISBN 10: 0521761921 / ISBN 13: 9780521761925

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2014

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9780521761925

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Parentheticals in Spoken English: The Syntax-Prosody Relation (Studies in English Language)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521761921
• ISBN 13: 9780521761925
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Taking both an empirical and a theoretical view of the prosodic phrasing of parentheticals in English, this book reviews the syntactic and prosodic literature on parentheticals along with relevant theoretical work at the syntax-prosody interface. It offers a detailed prosodic analysis of six types of parentheticals - full parenthetical clauses, non-restrictive relative clauses, nominal appositions, comment clauses, reporting verbs, and question tags, all taken from the spoken part of the British Component of the International Corpus of English. To date, the common assumption is that, by default, parentheticals are prosodically phrased separately, an assumption which, as this study shows, is not always in line with the predictions made by current prosodic theory. The present study provides new empirical evidence for the prosodic phrasing of parentheticals in spontaneous and semi-spontaneous spoken English, and offers new implications for a theory of linguistic interfaces.

About the Author

Nicole Dehé is a Professor of General Linguistics at Universität Konstanz, Germany.