Parentheticals in Spoken English
The Syntax-Prosody Relation

This book investigates the prosodic phrasing of parentheticals in spoken English and implications for a theory of the syntax-prosody interface.

Nicole Dehé (Author)

9780521761925, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 June 2014

257 pages, 30 b/w illus. 18 tables
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.5 kg

'With this careful and thorough investigation into the prosody of parentheses, Nicole Dehé underlines the relevance of studying spoken language data, providing an important contribution to research on the syntax-phonology interface.' Mark de Vries, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands

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.

1. Parentheticals in English: introduction
2. The syntax and prosody of parentheticals
3. Parentheticals, intonational phrasing and prosodic theory
4. Data analysis, results and discussion
5. Final discussion.

Subject Areas: Grammar, syntax & morphology [CFK], Phonetics, phonology [CFH], Linguistics [CF], Language [C]