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).
1986Syntactic persistence in language production. Cognitive Psychology 181. 355–387.
Bock, J. Kathryn & Zenzi M. Griffin
2000The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 129(2). 177–192.
Boersma, Frederic J. & D. Weenink
2011Praat: Doing phonetics by computer[Computer Software]. Amsterdam: Department of Language and Literature, University of Amsterdam. Retrieved from [URL].
Bolinger, Dwight
1961Contrastive accent and contrastive stress. Language 37(1). 83–96.
Bolinger, Dwight
1976Meaning and memory. Forum Linguisticum 1(1). 1–14.
Bybee, Joan
2010Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1976Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Charles N. Li (ed.), Subject and topic, 25–55. New York: Academic Press.
Chafe, Wallace
1994Discourse, consciousness and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Croft, William
1995Intonation units and grammatical structure. Linguistics 331: 839–882.
Croft, William & D. Alan Cruse
2004Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dehé, Nicole
2009Clausal parentheticals, intonational phrasing, and prosodic theory. Journal of Linguistics 451. 569–615.
1987The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63(4). 805–855.
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
1993Outline of discourse transcription. In Jane Edwards & Martin Lampert (eds), Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse, 45–89. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Fry, Dennis B
1958Experiments in the perception of stress. Language and Speech 1(2). 126–152.
Givón, T
1979On understanding grammar. New York: Academic Press.
2001Syntax: An introduction, vol. 11, 21 vols., 21 edn. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goldberg, Adele E
2013Constructionist approaches. In T. Hoffman & G. Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Construction Grammar, 15–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halliday, M.A.K
1994An introduction to functional grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Hirschberg, Julia & Janet Pierrehumbert
1986The 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
1985Metalinguistic negation and pragmatic ambiguity. Language 61(1). 121–174.
Kärkkäinen, Elise
2007The role of I guess in conversational stancetaking. In Robert Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, 183–220. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Krahmer, Emiel & Marc Swerts
2001On the alleged existence of contrastive accents. Speech Communication 341. 391–405.
Labov, William
1969Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula. Language 45(4). 715–762.
Labov, William
1994Principles of linguistic change: Internal factors, vol. 11, 31 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Labov, William
2005Quantitative 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.
Levinson, Stephen C
1987Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora: A partial pragmatic reduction of binding and control phenomena. Journal of Linguistics 23(2). 379–434.
Mayol, Laia
2010Contrastive pronouns in null subject Romance languages. Lingua 1201. 2497–2514.
1995What can conversation tell us about syntax? In Philip W. Davis (ed.), Alternative linguistics: Descriptive and theoretical modes, 213–271. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Paredes Silva, Vera Lucia
1993Subject omission and functional compensation: Evidence from written Brazilian Portuguese. Language Variation and Change 5(1). 35–49.
Payne, Thomas E
1997Describing morphosyntax: A guide to field linguists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pierrehumbert, Janet & Julia Hirschberg
1990The 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.
Poplack, Shana
1980The 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.
Poplack, Shana & Elisabete Malvar
2007Elucidating the transition period in linguistic change: The expression of the future in Brazilian Portuguese. Probus 191. 121–169.
Poplack, Shana & Sali Tagliamonte
2001African American English in the diaspora. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Prince, Ellen F
1981Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Peter Cole (ed.), Radical pragmatics, 223–255. New York: Academic press.
Redeker, Gisela
1991Linguistic markers of discourse structure [review of Discourse Markers by Deborah Schiffrin]. Linguistics 291. 1139–1172.
Sankoff, David
1988aSociolinguistics and syntactic variation. In Frederick Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge survey (Vol. 41, Language: The socio-cultural context), 140–161. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sankoff, David
1988bVariable 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.
Sankoff, David, Sali Tagliamonte & Eric Smith
(2012) Goldvarb LION: A variable rule application for Macintosh. University of Toronto. URL [URL].
Scheibman, Joanne
2000I dunno: A usage-based account of the phonological reduction of don’t in American English conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 32(1). 105–124.
Scherre, Maria Marta Pereira & Anthony J. Naro
1991Marking in discourse: ‘Birds of a feather’. Language Variation and Change 3(1). 23–32.
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen
2001Sociolingüística y pragmática del español (Georgetown Studies in Spanish Linguistics). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen
2003Otra 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.
Sun, Chao Fen & T. Givón
1985On the so-called SOV word order in Mandarin Chinese: A quantified text study and its implications. Language 61(2). 329–351.
Swerts, Marc, Emiel Krahmer & Cinzia Avesani
2002Prosodic marking of information status in Dutch and Italian: A comparative analysis. Journal of Phonetics 30(4). 629–654.
Tagliamonte, Sali & Jennifer Smith
2005No momentary fancy! The zero ‘complementizer’ in English dialects. English Language and Linguistics 9(2). 289–309.
Tao, Hongyin
2001Discovering 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.
1991The discourse conditions for the use of the complementizer that in conversational English. Journal of Pragmatics 151. 237–251.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine E. Travis
2011Using structural variability to evaluate convergence via code-switching. International Journal of Bilingualism 15(3). 241–267.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine E. Travis
2014Prosody, priming and particular constructions: The patterning of English first-person singular subject expression in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 631. 19–34.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Catherine E. Travis
ForthcomingAssessing 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.
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & James A. Walker
2009On the persistence of grammar in discourse formulas: A variationist study of that. Linguistics 47(1). 1–43.
Tottie, Gunnel
1991Lexical 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.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
1995Subjectification in grammaticalisation. In Dieter Stein & Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation: Linguistic perspectives, 31–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Travis, Catherine E
2005Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy (Cognitive Linguistics Research). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Travis, Catherine E
2007Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19(2). 101–135.
Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos
2012What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4). 711–748.
Van Bogaert, Julie
2010A 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.
Weiner, E. Judith & William Labov
1983Constraints on the agentless passive. Journal of Linguistics 19(1). 29–58.
2020. Code-Switching Strategies: Prosody and Syntax. Frontiers in Psychology 11
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.
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.
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.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 april 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.