The prosody of discourse functions: The case of appositive relative clauses in spoken British English Corpus.

Cyril Auran (1) , Rudy Loock (1)

1 STL - Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) - UMR 8163

This paper aims to explore how discourse functions and prosodic realisations can be related through an analysis of appositive relative clauses (ARCs) in English. Based on a corpus study of spoken British English through the use of the Aix-Marsec and ICE-GB corpora, our aim is twofold: 1) to establish the singularity of ARCs within the global category of parentheticals; and 2) to show that, for one specific syntactic structure, in this instance ARCs, differences in discourse functions correspond not only to differences in morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics as proposed in Loock's (2005, 2007, 2010) threefold discourse typology, but also to differences in prosodic features (regarding tonal, temporal and intensity aspects).

Mots clés: appositive relative clauses; parentheticals; discourse; prosody; spoken English; Aix-marsec; ICE-GB

Domaines: Linguistique

Cyril Auran, Rudy Loock. The prosody of discourse functions: The case of appositive relative clauses in spoken British English Corpus.. Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2011, 7 (2), pp. 181-201. ⟨10.1515/cllt.2011.009⟩. ⟨halshs-00618349⟩