Couper-Kuhlen1996a
| Couper-Kuhlen1996a | |
|---|---|
| BibType | ARTICLE |
| Key | Couper-Kuhlen1996a |
| Author(s) | Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen |
| Title | Intonation and clause-combining in discourse: The case of because |
| Editor(s) | |
| Tag(s) | IL, Prosody, Clause-combining, because |
| Publisher | John Benjamins Publishing |
| Year | 1996 |
| Language | English |
| City | Amsterdam / Philadelphia |
| Month | |
| Journal | Pragmatics |
| Volume | 6 |
| Number | 2 |
| Pages | 389-426 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1075/prag.6.3.04cou |
| ISBN | |
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Abstract
Recent years have seen extensive discussion of clause combining in synchronic and diachronic perspective (Haiman & Thompson 1988; Traugott & Konig l99l; Hopper & Traugott 1993). The thrust of much of this research - implicit in the term 'clause combining' itself - has been to cast doubt upon the traditional dichotomy of coordination vs. subordination (Irhmann 1988; also Haiman & Thompson 1984). New models have been proposed for describing text-semantic, or rhetorical, links between clauses at the level of discourse rather than at the level of sentence (Mann 1984; Matthiessen & Thompson 1988; Mann 1992). And empirical studies have begun to appear showing what lexical and grammatical resources real speakers and writers rely on for particular kinds of clause linkage in spoken and written discourse (for causal linkage, see e.g. Altenberg 1984, 1987; Ford 1993, 1994). Yet with only one or two notable exceptions, the intonation of clause combining has not figured centrally in these investigations. The present study, aligned in the empirical tradition, sets out to examine specifically how English speakers deploy pitch, loudness and timing in the configuration of lexically marked causal clause combining in discourse.l The study is based on close analysis of the use of becawe as a clause connector in approximately four hours of British and American spoken discourse, including face-to-face family chat, radio phone-in programs and televised public debate. Approximately 200 tokens of because underwent auditory and instrumental phonetic analysis in the course of the study. It will be argued that there is evidence for two distinct intonational patterns associated with causal clause combining in English. These patterns are found in different sequential environments and can be shown to have different sequential implications for subsequent talk. Moreover, they appear to be used prototypically for trvo different types of semantic causality and can thus be said to contribute to the constitution of distinct constructional schemas for causal linkage. However, the two constructions differ in terms of markedness. This markedness relation togetherwith a preference for'degrammaticizing'constructional schemas for causal clause combining in conversation conspire to favor only one of the intonational and sequential patterns vith becarue, thus accounting for its prevalence in the data corpus.
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