Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English and Cuban Spanish
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Nottingham ePrints Garcia Romero, Gilberto (2013) Contrastive modelling of the intonation of recapitulatory echo interrogative sentences in modern American English and Cuban Spanish. MA(Res) thesis, University of Nottingham. Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/13527/1/AN_INTONATIONAL_ANALYSIS_OF_THE_INTERR OGATIVE_SYSTEMS_IN_MODERN_ENGLISH_AND_CUBAN_SPANISH_2012.pdf Copyright and reuse: The Nottingham ePrints service makes this work by researchers of the University of Nottingham available open access under the following conditions. · Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. · To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in Nottingham ePrints has been checked for eligibility before being made available. · Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not- for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. · Quotations or similar reproductions must be sufficiently acknowledged. Please see our full end user licence at: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/end_user_agreement.pdf A note on versions: The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. For more information, please contact [email protected] Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English and Cuban Spanish Gilberto García Romero, B.A Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English and Cuban Spanish Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of MA (by Research) Hispanic and Latin American Studies 2012 - 1 - Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English and Cuban Spanish Abstract. Human speech communication is rich in expressive stylistic, syntactic, lexical and discourse devices which are commonly used to express feelings, attitudes and volitions. Supported by the important contributions of CDA, discourse intonation, discourse semantics and pragmatics this dissertation presents a broad contrastive analysis of the intonation patterns of recapitulatory echo interrogatives in Cuban Spanish and American English. A corpus-driven methodology stresses the importance of prosodic features of any language in the analysis of social interaction. As a step forward in the analysis of interrogative sentences in English and Spanish, this research presents relevant data which can be used in the teaching of English as a second foreign language in most schools in Cuba, as well as Spanish to foreign students. - 2 - Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English and Cuban Spanish Acknowledgments I would like to thank all those people who, in a way or another, have made this important dream come true. Special thanks to my parents, colleagues, friends who have supported me in the hardest moments of this investigation. And I would also like to gratify my supervisors- Ana Curbeira Cancela and Modesta Correoso Bouly, from the School of Foreign Languages of the University of Havana and Alvaro Vidal Bouzon from the University of Nottingham, for their help and commitment. I could not turn this page without acknowledging my students (Lauren Vera & Darlene Herrera, Yudenia & Jesús, Yisel González, and Yoandris Ferrales) for their paramount research works and the good results achieved, which are somehow reflected throughout this dissertation. - 3 - Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English and Cuban Spanish To my parents, Oneida y José Ramón; To my Grandma F. Eustaquia; To my siblings, Marlen and Adalberto, To my friends, colleagues and Students. - 4 - Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English and Cuban Spanish TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract Acknowledgments Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................... 7 The Cuban Spanish & American English variants ........................................... 9 Dissertation structure ........................................................................................ 10 Chapter I The English and Cuban Spanish Intonation Systems: theories and 12 approaches to its analysis and research methods .............................................. 1.1 The linguistic value of intonation ……………………..…………............ 13 1.2. A brief history of intonation researches before and after the 1920s by English and Hispanic scholars: main assumptions and contributions ………………..……………………..................……....… 17 1.3 Halliday’s grammatical approach to intonation ………………................ 20 1.4 The Hispanic tradition of intonation studies: main exponents and contributions ……………………………………......................……....… 39 1.5 Intonation studies in Cuba: the intonation patterns of the Cuban Spanish variant ………………………………….…….…......................... 46 Chapter II Intonation and Conversational Discourse Analysis ………......... 56 2.1 Conversational Discourse Analysis: Speech Act Theory, Intonation & Illocutionary Force ……………….……………………………………… 57 2.2 Intonation and Semantic Modality: Expressiveness as a modal semantic macro-category) …………………….................……………………… 69 Chapter III Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Escandell’s Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English & Cuban Spanish …. 74 3.1 The interrogatives: generalisations within the English and Spanish grammars …………………………………...……….................... 74 3.2 Modelling of the Intonation of the Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English & Cuban Spanish. Working methodology and corpus analysis …………………………...……………………........... 79 3.2.1 Pronominal and absolute interrogative sentences ............................... 82 3. 2. 2 Irony, intonation and echo interrogative sentences .......................... 84 3.3 Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative sentences …………........................….. 93 - 5 - Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English and Cuban Spanish Conclusions ........................................................................................................... 99 Annexes ................................................................................................................. 101 Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 125 - 6 - Contrastive Modelling of the Intonation of Recapitulatory Echo Interrogative Sentences in Modern American English and Cuban Spanish Introduction There resides in every language a characteristic world-view every language contains the whole conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of mankind Wilhelm von Humboldt (1988: 60) Through the years, major interdisciplinary research on language and communication has unveiled important aspects of our everyday life, which have led us to understand the intricacies of human interaction. In chapter I of her latest book Interpersonal Communication: Everyday Encounters, Wood states that the process of socialization, a term which oftentimes intersects with communication, is of a great importance since it “teaches us how to communicate and interpret what others do and say.”(2010:13) In her article “Prosody and discourse: a diachronic approach”, →ichmann highlights this interdisciplinary character of discourse since, as the linguist states, its approaches mainly derive from fields such as anthropology, philosophy, sociology and linguistics. She analyses “language as it constructs or reflects social reality” (2006: 3). As she refers to in her article “Conversational Analysis owes more to sociology, and is more concerned with how conversationalists jointly create order in that part of social interaction that is “talk” [§2.2]. The latter assertion presents the main objective of most research works on this field, in which discourse prosody plays a key role in the analysis of the expression of interpersonal meaning and its role in the management of interaction. Therefore, intonation serves as a signalling device fulfilling interactional needs – the need to jointly construct and negotiate verbal interaction (2000:125). So it is language: socialization, language negotiation, verbal interaction, communication. The idea of this dissertation has emerged from the need of improving the teaching of intonation in pronunciation lessons at the School of Foreign Languages of the University of Havana and as a follow-up to a wide range of works on Discourse Intonation by a group of students under my supervision. But, why recapitulatory echo interrogative sentences? A preliminary analysis of Cuban Spanish and American English shows the increasing use of echoic utterances