Prosody across sentence types
Maria Esipova
August 2024 

Rudin (2018); Rudin & Rudin (2022) make a typological generalization that languages in which rising declaratives comprise non-canonical yes/no questions (YNQs), like English and Bulgarian, also allow for rising imperatives, used as tentative, but invested requests or disinterested suggestions, but languages in which rising declaratives comprise canonical YNQs, like Macedonian, don't allow for such rising imperatives. I look at another Slavic language, Russian, further expanding and fine-tuning the typology of how different languages realize various meaning components of different types of speech acts. While, like in Macedonian, Russian canonical YNQs are formed via an "intonation-only" strategy, said intonation doesn't involve a rising tune, but a special prosodic peak that I call the Q-Peak. I show that, despite marking canonical YNQs, the Q-Peak can also be used in friendly, but invested requests—but not in disinterested suggestions. I propose that the Q-Peak realizes an operator that asks the addressee to react to the speaker's speech act, which is appropriate in (some) questions and invested requests, but not in disinterested suggestions. The Russian Q-Peak is therefore distinct from the English-style rising tune, which in Rudin (& Rudin's) terms, simply "call[s] off the speaker's commitment to their utterance". The latter can thus have a wider range of meaning effects and brings a different source/flavor of politeness/tentativeness to directives.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008389 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Submitted to 'Proceedings of SALT 34' (preprint)
keywords:	semantics, pragmatics, prosody, yes/no questions, rising declaratives, imperatives, cohortatives, russian, semantics, phonology
Downloaded:	303 times

 

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