Couper-Kuhlen1993

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Couper-Kuhlen1993
BibType BOOK
Key Couper-Kuhlen1993
Author(s) Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen
Title English Speech Rhythm: Form and Function in Everyday Verbal Interaction
Editor(s)
Tag(s) IL, Speech rhythm
Publisher John Benjamins
Year 1993
Language
City Amsterdam
Month
Journal
Volume
Number
Pages
URL Link
DOI 10.1075/pbns.25
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

This monograph reconsiders the question of speech isochrony, the regular recurrence of (stressed) syllables in time, from an empirical point of view. It proposes a methodology for discovering isochrony auditorily in speech and for verifying it instrumentally in the acoustic laboratory. In a small-scale study of an English conversational extract, the gestalt-like rhythmic structures which isochrony creates are shown to have a hierarchical organization. Then in a large-scale study of a corpus of British and American radio phone-in programs and family table conversations, the function of speech rhythm at turn transitions is investigated. It is argued that speech rhythm serves as a metric for the timing of turn transitions in casual English conversation. The articular rhythmic configuration of a transition can be said to contextualize the next turn as, generally speaking, affiliative or disaffiliative with the prior turn. The empirical investigation suggests that speech rhythm patterns at turn transitions in everyday English conversation are not random occurrences or the result of a social-psychological adaptation process but are contextualization cues which figure systematically in the creation and interpretation of linguistic meaning in communication.

Notes