Two Pragmatic Functions of Breathy Voice in American English Conversation [Elektronisk resurs]

• Although the paralinguistic and phonological significance of breathy voice is well known, its pragmatic roles have been little studied. We report a systematic exploration of the pragmatic functions of breathy voice in American English, using a small corpus of casual conversations, using the Cepstral Peak Prominence Smoothed measure as an indicator of breathy voice, and using a common workflow to find prosodic constructions and identify their meanings. We found two prosodic constructions involving breathy voice. The first involves a short region of breathy voice in the midst of a region of low pitch, functioning to mark self-directed speech. The second involves breathy voice over several seconds, combined with a moment of wider pitch range leading to a high pitch over about a second, functioning to mark an attempt to establish common ground. These interpretations were confirmed by a perception experiment. 

Ämnesord

Natural Sciences  (hsv)

Computer and Information Sciences  (hsv)

Language Technology (Computational Linguistics)  (hsv)

Naturvetenskap  (hsv)

Data- och informationsvetenskap  (hsv)

Språkteknologi (språkvetenskaplig databehandling)  (hsv)

Speech and Music Communication  (kth)

Tal- och musikkommunikation  (kth)

Genre

government publication  (marcgt)

Indexterm och SAB-rubrik

CPPS

voice quality

self-directed speech

common ground

grounding

explaining

prosodic constructions