The exclamative sentence is a grammatical category used to convey a surprising effect. Among non-declarative sentences, the prosody of exclamatives has not received much attention. Previous works focused in particular on syntactic and semantic aspects. On the contrary, the literature on exclamative prosody is scarce. This paper investigates the exclamative intonation of the Cosenza Italian. A wide corpus of wh, non-wh and elliptic exclamatives was analysed, both phonetically and phonologically. The intonation patterns were analyzed according to the autosegmental-metrical framework. Results showed that all exclamatives have an extra high F0 contour and a wider pitch range with respect to declarative sentences; a remarkable lengthening of the final stressed syllable was observed too. The exclamative sentences exhibited a relevant prosodic characterization, coherently with its expressive status, always out of norms. The perceptual effect was both typical and distinctive; the prosodic features acted as linguistic indicators of illocutive force. The prosodic structure, in some way or another, conveyed semantic and pragmatic meanings. In the final part, some hypotheses on the possible correlation between pragmatic and prosodic components are put forth.
Aspetti pragmatici e prosodici dell’atto esclamativo
SORIANELLO, Patrizia
2011-01-01
Abstract
The exclamative sentence is a grammatical category used to convey a surprising effect. Among non-declarative sentences, the prosody of exclamatives has not received much attention. Previous works focused in particular on syntactic and semantic aspects. On the contrary, the literature on exclamative prosody is scarce. This paper investigates the exclamative intonation of the Cosenza Italian. A wide corpus of wh, non-wh and elliptic exclamatives was analysed, both phonetically and phonologically. The intonation patterns were analyzed according to the autosegmental-metrical framework. Results showed that all exclamatives have an extra high F0 contour and a wider pitch range with respect to declarative sentences; a remarkable lengthening of the final stressed syllable was observed too. The exclamative sentences exhibited a relevant prosodic characterization, coherently with its expressive status, always out of norms. The perceptual effect was both typical and distinctive; the prosodic features acted as linguistic indicators of illocutive force. The prosodic structure, in some way or another, conveyed semantic and pragmatic meanings. In the final part, some hypotheses on the possible correlation between pragmatic and prosodic components are put forth.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
