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Title:
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Prosodic Features In Spontaneous Narratives
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Author:
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Miguel Oliveira
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.oliveira.tripod.com
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Degree Awarded:
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Simon Fraser University
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2000
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Discourse Analysis
Phonetics
Pragmatics
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Director(s):
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Zita McRobbie
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Abstract:
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Any type of discourse consists of spans of utterances (segments) displaying a coherent relationship. Narratives are thought to be composed of clearly recognizable semantically independent segments (or sections). There exist several approaches attempting to describe this underlying grammar (or model) of narrative. However, no empirical evidence of such a grammar, using spontaneous, non-elicited data has been presented so far.
The present study examines the role prosody plays in the assigning of boundaries in narrative discourse. It also investigates the recurrence of specific prosodic features in semantically individualized narrative sections. If prosody is found to reveal the segmentation of narrative and to characterize narrative sections by m eans of a recurrent pattern, this constitutes evidence that (oral) narrative presents a well-defined structure.
The data consist of 17 spontaneous / non-elicited narrative texts, told in the course of conversations between the researcher and 8 subjects, under appropriate laboratory condition.
Inspired by the literature, the following prosodic variables were selected for analysis: pause, speech rate, pitch range, pitch reset and boundary tones. It was found that the boundaries occurr ing between narrative sections (narrative boundaries) are prosodically different from those that occur exclusively between clauses (clause boundaries). This was verified in terms of (i) pause occurrence and duration (pauses occur more frequently and are g enerally longer at narrative boundaries), (ii) pitch reset values (the difference in pitch range values between two adjacent clauses is higher at narrative boundaries) and (iii) boundary tones (low boundary tones usually occur at narrative boundaries). Fu rther, it was observed that narrative sections are regularly characterized by the recurrence of specific prosodic patterns, such as (i) variation in speech rate (slower speech rates characterize sections considered highly relevant, faster rates characteri ze sections of low relevance), and (ii) variation in pitch range (higher pitch ranges characterize sections considered highly relevant, lower pitch ranges characterize sections of low relevance).
These findings lead to the conclusion that spontaneously produced narratives are framed by an underlying structure, and that storytellers appear to be aware of such a structure. This awareness is evidenced through the systematic employment of prosodic devices.
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