Cover not available
Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 38:2 (2014) ► pp.360–392

Stress on I

Debunking unitary contrast accounts

 | Australian National University, Pennsylvania State University
Much previous work on stress describes its function as being that of marking contrast. While some evidence has been adduced in experimental studies, work on spontaneous speech data has been plagued by a lack of operational definitions. To address this, we examine approximately 1,500 tokens of the English first singular subject pronoun in a corpus of conversational American English. Independently motivated operationalizations of contrast fail to support an overarching contrastive function of stress on I. Rather, examining co-occurrence patterns through multivariate analysis, we find that, besides chunked units (including discourse formulae as delimited by frequency and positioning), patterns of stress are subject to context-dependent discourse factors: accessibility (measured in distance from the previous mention), in tandem with coreferential priming (a tendency to repeat a preceding coreferential stressed I), as well as turn taking (an initial-position effect), and contrast in a semantic sense (manifested in higher rates of stress under negative polarity).
Keywords: subject realization, stress, accessibility, contrast, variation, constructions, priming
Published online: 8 August 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.38.2.04tra
References (72)
Ariel, Mira. 1988. Referring and accessibility. Journal of Linguistics 24(1). 65–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1990. Accessing noun-phrase antecedents. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall.Google Scholar
Barlow, Michael. 2004. MonoConc Pro.
Beckman, Mary E. 1986. Stress and non-stress accent (Netherlands Phonetic Archives No. 7). Dordrecht: Foris Publications. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn. 1986. Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 181. 355–387. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bock, J. Kathryn & Zenzi M. Griffin. 2000. The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 129(2). 177–192. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Frederic J. & D. Weenink. 2011. Praat: Doing phonetics by computer[Computer Software]. Amsterdam: Department of Language and Literature, University of Amsterdam. Retrieved from [URL].Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1961. Contrastive accent and contrastive stress. Language 37(1). 83–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1976. Meaning and memory. Forum Linguisticum 1(1). 1–14.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2010. Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Richard & Nydia Flores-Ferrán. 2003. Perseveration of subject expression across regional dialects of Spanish. Spanish in Context 1(1). 41–65. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and topic, 25–55. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
. 1994. Discourse, consciousness and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Croft, William. 1995. Intonation units and grammatical structure. Linguistics 331: 839–882. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croft, William & D. Alan Cruse. 2004. Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole. 2009. Clausal parentheticals, intonational phrasing, and prosodic theory. Journal of Linguistics 451. 569–615. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dehé, Nicole & Anne Wichmann. 2010a. The multifunctionality of epistemic parentheticals in discourse: Prosodic cues to the semantic-pragmatic boundary. Functions of Language 17(1). 1–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John W. 1987. The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63(4). 805–855. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Du Bois, John W., Wallace L. Chafe, Charles Myer, Sandra A. Thompson, Robert Englebretson & Nii Martey. 2000-2005. Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American, Parts 1-4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.
Du Bois, John W., Stephan Schuetze-Coburn, Susanna Cumming & Danae Paolino. 1993. Outline of discourse transcription. In Jane Edwards & Martin Lampert (eds), Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse, 45–89. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Fry, Dennis B. 1958. Experiments in the perception of stress. Language and Speech 1(2). 126–152. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Givón, T. 1979. On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
. (ed.). 1983a. Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-linguistic study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1983b. Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In T. Givón (ed.), Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-linguistic study, 1–41. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2001. Syntax: An introduction, vol. 11, 21 vols., 21 edn. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele E. 2013. Constructionist approaches. In T. Hoffman & G. Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar, 15–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Halliday, M.A.K. 1994. An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Hirschberg, Julia & Janet Pierrehumbert. 1986. The intonational structure of discourse, Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Discourse , 136–144. New York, NY.
Horn, Laurence R. 1985. Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity. Language 61(1). 121–174. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kärkkäinen, Elise. 2007. The role of I guess in conversational stancetaking. In Robert Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, 183–220. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krahmer, Emiel & Marc Swerts. 2001. On the alleged existence of contrastive accents. Speech Communication 341. 391–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 1969. Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula. Language 45(4). 715–762. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1994. Principles of linguistic change: Internal factors, vol. 11, 31 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
. 2005. Quantitative reasoning in linguistics. In Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier & Peter Trudgill (eds.), Sociolinguistics/Soziolinguistik: An international handbook of the science of language and society, vol. 11, 2nd edn, 6–22. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 1987. Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora: A partial pragmatic reduction of binding and control phenomena. Journal of Linguistics 23(2). 379–434. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mayol, Laia. 2010. Contrastive pronouns in null subject Romance languages. Lingua 1201. 2497–2514. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Myhill, John & Zhiqun Xing. 1996. Towards an operational definition of contrast. Studies in Language 20(2). 303–360. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ono, Tsuyoshi & Sandra A. Thompson. 1995. What can conversation tell us about syntax? In Philip W. Davis (ed.), Alternative linguistics: Descriptive and theoretical modes, 213–271. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Paredes Silva, Vera Lucia. 1993. Subject omission and functional compensation: Evidence from written Brazilian Portuguese. Language Variation and Change 5(1). 35–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Payne, Thomas E. 1997. Describing morphosyntax: A guide to field linguists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pierrehumbert, Janet & Julia Hirschberg. 1990. The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan & Martha E. Pollack (eds.), Intentions in communication, 271–311. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana. 1980. The notion of the plural in Puerto Rican Spanish: Competing constraints on (s) deletion. In William Labov (ed.), Locating language in time and space, 55–67. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Elisabete Malvar. 2007. Elucidating the transition period in linguistic change: The expression of the future in Brazilian Portuguese. Probus 191. 121–169. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Sali Tagliamonte. 2001. African American English in the diaspora. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Peter Cole (ed.), Radical pragmatics, 223–255. New York: Academic press.Google Scholar
Redeker, Gisela. 1991. Linguistic markers of discourse structure [review of Discourse Markers by Deborah Schiffrin]. Linguistics 291. 1139–1172.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David. 1988a. Sociolinguistics and syntactic variation. In Frederick Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge survey (Vol. 41, Language: The socio-cultural context), 140–161. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1988b. Variable rules. In Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar & Klaus J. Mattheier (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society, vol. 21, 984–997. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David, Sali Tagliamonte & Eric Smith. (2012). Goldvarb LION: A variable rule application for Macintosh. University of Toronto. URL [URL].Google Scholar
Scheibman, Joanne. 2000. I dunno: A usage-based account of the phonological reduction of don’t in American English conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 32(1). 105–124. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scherre, Maria Marta Pereira & Anthony J. Naro. 1991. Marking in discourse: ‘Birds of a feather’. Language Variation and Change 3(1). 23–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 2001. Sociolingüística y pragmática del español (Georgetown Studies in Spanish Linguistics). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
. 2003. Otra mirada a la expresión del sujeto como variable sintáctica. In Francisco Moreno Fernández, Francisco Gimeno Menéndez, José Antonio Samper, María Luz Gutiérrez Araua, María Vaquero & César Hernández (eds.), Lengua, Variación y contexto: Estudios dedicados a Humberto López Morales, vol. 21, 849–860. Madrid: Arco Libros.Google Scholar
Sun, Chao Fen & T. Givón. 1985. On the so-called SOV word order in Mandarin Chinese: A quantified text study and its implications. Language 61(2). 329–351. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Swerts, Marc, Emiel Krahmer & Cinzia Avesani. 2002. Prosodic marking of information status in Dutch and Italian: A comparative analysis. Journal of Phonetics 30(4). 629–654. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali & Jennifer Smith. 2005. No momentary fancy! The zero ‘complementizer’ in English dialects. English Language and Linguistics 9(2). 289–309. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tao, Hongyin. 2001. Discovering the usual with corpora: The case of remember . In Rita C. Simpson & John M. Swales (eds.), Corpus linguistics in North America, 116–144. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A. 1998. A discourse explanation for the cross-linguistic differences in the grammar of interrogation and negation. In Anna Siewierska & Jae Jung Song (eds.), Case, typology and grammar: In honor of Barry J. Blake, 309–341. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2002. ‘Object Complements’ and conversation: Towards a realistic account. Studies in Language 26(1). 125–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Sandra A. & Anthony Mulac. 1991. The discourse conditions for the use of the complementizer that in conversational English. Journal of Pragmatics 151. 237–251. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine E. Travis. 2011. Using structural variability to evaluate convergence via code-switching. International Journal of Bilingualism 15(3). 241–267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2014. Prosody, priming and particular constructions: The patterning of English first-person singular subject expression in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 631. 19–34. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. Forthcoming. Assessing inter-linguistic (dis)similarity via intra-linguistic variability for subject expression. In Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco & Naomi Lapidus Shin (eds.). Subject pronoun expression in Spanish: A cross-dialectal perspective. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & James A. Walker. 2009. On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: A variationist study of that . Linguistics 47(1). 1–43. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tottie, Gunnel. 1991. Lexical diffusion in syntactic change: Frequency as a determinant of linguistic conservatism in the development of negation in English. In Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), Historical English syntax, 439–467. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1995. Subjectification in grammaticalisation. In Dieter Stein & Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation: Linguistic perspectives, 31–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Travis, Catherine E. 2005. Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy (Cognitive Linguistics Research). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
. 2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19(2). 101–135. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4). 711–748. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Bogaert, Julie. 2010. A constructional taxonomy of I think and related expressions: Accounting for the variability of complement-taking mental predicates. English Language and Linguistics 14(3). 399–437. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Weiner, E. Judith & William Labov. 1983. Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics 19(1). 29–58. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Torres Cacoullos, Rena
2020. Code-Switching Strategies: Prosody and Syntax. Frontiers in Psychology 11 DOI logo
TRAVIS, CATHERINE E., RENA TORRES CACOULLOS & EVAN KIDD
2017. Cross-language priming: A view from bilingual speech. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 20:2 ► pp. 283 ff. DOI logo
Steuck, Jonathan
2016. Exploring the syntax-semantics-prosody interface. In Inquiries in Hispanic Linguistics [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 12], ► pp. 73 ff. DOI logo
TORRES CACOULLOS, RENA & CATHERINE E. TRAVIS
2016. Two languages, one effect: Structural priming in spontaneous code-switching. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 19:4 ► pp. 733 ff. DOI logo
Travis, Catherine E. & Amy M. Lindstrom
2016. Different registers, different grammars? Subject expression in English conversation and narrative. Language Variation and Change 28:1 ► pp. 103 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.