Title: Identifying register and speaker 'stance' from prosodic strategies, a comparison of Spanish and English parallel corpora.

Partial results, presented at LSA and other conferences.

It is well-documented that 'register' (or 'style') has a major influence on linguistic variation (Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998; Rickford & Eckert 2001), and that intonation is one of the varying parameters (or 'factors') which influence this variation. Recent advances in data collection and acoustic analysis now permit accurate investigation of prosodic variation as it intersects with register. In the process of analyzing such data we found that it was necessary to focus on a given speaker's 'stance' when doing prosodic analysis, because the same type of 'speech act' — say 'agreement' or 'disagreement' - are not treated in the same way by speakers in different social situations.

This paper will consider a specific environment in which focal accent can be expected: not-negation used in actual interactions. The paper will compare prosodic prominence on not/no in English and Spanish [respectively]. Speech researchers have concluded that pitch prominence occurs on not almost categorically in read sentences (O'Shaughnessey & Allen 1983). This paper will compare English and Spanish 'CallFriend' phone conversations between friends (from the LDC; Url: www.ldc.upenn.edu). The paper will show that there is a wide range of variation in prosodic strategies used for conveying negative information and that the variation is correlated with the language being spoken.

All tokens of not or n't (for English) and no (for Spanish) in the declarative sentences in the corpus were coded for linguistic environmental factors, information content, speaker characteristics [dialect, age, gender] and interactive factors [e.g., whether the negative is considered to be a repair, what the relationship is between interlocutors], as well as for intonational characteristics [using a system based loosely on ToBI]; results of the multivariate analysis of the coded data will be discussed. The evidence will demonstrate that register and interactive factors are critical for an adequate understanding of the intonation used for negatives. It will demolish the hypothesis that information which is critical to the hearer must be prosodically prominent, since in many situations interactive 'face' concerns outweigh cognitive imperatives. [Work supported by NSF and by UAZ grants.]

Biber, Conrad and Reppen (1998) Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP.

O'Shaughnessy and Allen (1983) Linguistic modality effects on fundamental frequency JASA 1155-1171.

Rickford and Eckert, eds. (2001) Style and Variation. Cambridge: CUP.