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Building Categories in Interaction: Linguistic resources at work
Edited by Caterina Mauri, Ilaria Fiorentini and Eugenio Goria
[Studies in Language Companion Series 220] 2021
► pp. 155–186

Chapter 6
The Camel Humps prosodic pattern

Listing for disaffiliating in spoken Hebrew

| Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This chapter presents an analysis of a common prosodic pattern in spoken Hebrew. The pattern is characterized by a repetition of high rise-fall pitch movements, which visualize as successive “humps” in the pitch curve. Based on analysis of naturally occurring conversations, I show that speakers use this pattern to construct open lists of reinforcements for a counter-stance they take. In some cases, the use of the pattern is itself the act of taking a counter-stance, that is, in such cases the disaffiliation between the stance-takers is only prosodically cued. Such cases demonstrate that prosodic list patterns are used not only for the task of enumerating items under one category, but also as a resource for complex interactional activities.

The structure of the chapter is as follows. In Section 1, I introduce the premises underlying this study and describe the data. Section 2 includes a formal analysis of the pattern, followed by a functional analysis in Section 3. Conclusions are drawn in Section 4.

Keywords: prosody, Hebrew, list construction, stance, affiliation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The form
    • 2.1Prosodic structure
    • 2.2Syntactic structure
  • 3.The function
    • 3.1Reference-stance taken by another participant
    • 3.2Reference-stance attributed to another participant
    • 3.3Reported reference-stance
    • 3.4The Camel Humps pattern as an exclusive cue of disaffiliation
    • 3.5Interim summary
    • 3.6A different open list pattern in spoken Hebrew
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 6 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.220.06mat
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