Prosody and idioms in English

Ashby, Michael

doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2005.03.018

Cited by 19 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…All participants had hearing and vision (with corrective lenses) within normal limits by self-report. Sixteen persons diagnosed with idiopathic PD (six women, 10 men) with a mean age of 66.7 years (range = 46-81 years) and a mean 1 Many formulaic phrases have a specific prosodic and phonetic shape as well as a unique vocal quality, as in the phrase "fuhgeddaboudit," as derived from "forget about it" (Ashby, 2006;Hallin & Van Lancker Sidtis, 2014;Lin, 2010;Van Lancker Sidtis, 2006 of 16.7 years of education (range = 12-21 years) were recruited, consented, and were tested following institutional review board procedures. All were right handed except for one participant of unknown handedness.…”

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confidence: 99%

Formulaic Language in Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease: Complementary Effects of Subcortical and Cortical Dysfunction

Sidtis

Choi

Alken

et al. 2015

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose: The production of formulaic expressions (conversational speech formulas, pause fillers, idioms, and other fixed expressions) is excessive in the left hemisphere and deficient in the right hemisphere and in subcortical stroke. Speakers with Alzheimer's disease (AD), having functional basal ganglia, reveal abnormally high proportions of formulaic language. Persons with Parkinson's disease (PD), having dysfunctional basal ganglia, were predicted to show impoverished formulaic expressions in contrast to speakers with AD. This study compared participants with PD, participants with AD, and healthy control (HC) participants on protocols probing production and comprehension of formulaic expressions. Method: Spontaneous speech samples were recorded from 16 individuals with PD, 12 individuals with AD, and 18 HC speakers. Structured tests were then administered as probes of comprehension. Results: The PD group had lower proportions of formulaic expressions compared with the AD and HC groups. Comprehension testing yielded opposite contrasts: participants with PD showed significantly higher performance compared with participants with AD and did not differ from HC participants. Conclusions: The finding that PD produced lower proportions of formulaic expressions compared with AD and HC supports the view that subcortical nuclei modulate the production of formulaic expressions. Contrasting results on formal testing of comprehension, whereby participants with AD performed significantly worse than participants with PD and HC participants, indicate differential effects on procedural and declarative knowledge associated with these neurological conditions. C linical descriptions of formulaic language in aphasic speech have flourished for more than 150 years under a wide variety of terms. Formulaic language, in its modern conception, consists of fixed, unitary expressions known to a language community with their characteristic form, meaning, and usage conditions. Typical examples are conversational speech formulas ("You betcha," "You've got to be kidding," and "Say what?"), expletives ("heck"), idioms ("as the crow flies," "That's the way the cookie crumbles"), proverbs ("When it rains, it pours"), and other conventionalized expressions ("all things being equal," "in the meantime," and "the long and the short of it is"; Altenberg, 1998;Biber, 2009;Kuiper, 2004;Wray, 2002). These expressions share the features of fixed or canonical form; conventionalized, often nonliteral meaning; and specific relations to discourse context.As reviewed in Van Lancker (1973, 1975, 1994, formulaic language has its venerable beginnings in observations by J. Hughlings Jackson (1874aJackson ( /1932Jackson ( , 1874bJackson ( /1932, who labeled the preserved expressions seen in adults with language disability following left-brain damage automatic or nonpropositional speech. Examples cited by Hughlings Jackson include phrases belonging classically to the conception of formulaic expressions: "Take care," "That's a lie," "Good bye," "Oh dear," and "Bles...

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confidence: 99%

Formulaic Language in Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease: Complementary Effects of Subcortical and Cortical Dysfunction

Sidtis

Choi

Alken

et al. 2015

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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“…No doubt in certain cases they are merely following habitual idiomatic patterns (cf. Ashby 2006), but in others the native speakers may be following 'rules' much more complex and nuanced than those which find their way into intonation handbooks, and hitherto covert lexical, grammatical, semantic or pragmatic categories may be at work. It is doubtful whether these can be rendered accessible to the learner.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unruly intonation

Ashby

2017

linguistica

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In this paper we call into question the value of ‘rules’ concerning intonation to the learner of English. Are there predictive rules of sufficient generality and power to make them worth learning explicitly, or would learners’ time be better spent on habit-forming drills of common patterns? Examining a typical test passage for advanced students, we show that in all three systems of tonality, tonicity and tone, known ‘rules’ account only for a proportion of the ‘right’ or expected answers. There are plentiful instances where competent native speakers agree over the selection of a pattern, though no rule seems to guide their choice. We recommend that the utility of ‘rules’ should be evaluated in relation to the frequency of occurrence of the structures to which they apply, in the relevant types of discourse; that more attention be given to idiomatic expressions, and the prosodic patterns associated with particular lexical items; and that learners should be equipped with simple practical heuristics (e.g. for using punctuation as a guide to intonation when reading aloud).

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“…Essentially, sequence-internal markers capture some arbitrary irregularity of the string, which sets it apart from other, productively generated sequences of words. For example, investigations of the articulatory properties of formulaic strings have shown that compared to non-formulaic, novel strings, formulaic sequences display a set of idiosyncratic articulatory characteristics which include: reduced susceptibility to internal pausing and hesitation phenomena (Dahlmann 2009;Dahlmann and Adolphs 2009;Erman 2006Erman , 2007Guz 2014;Wray 2004); alignment with intonational units (Lin 2010;Lin and Adolphs 2009); idiosyncratic accentual patterns (Ashby 2006;Wells 2006) and susceptibility to phonetic reduction (Bybee 1998(Bybee , 2001). Semantic compositionality is another sequence-internal property that has been frequently prioritised as the main indicator of the formulaic status.…”

Section: Sequence-internal Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Refining the methodology for investigating the relationship between fluency and the use of formulaic language in learner speech

Guz

2016

RiL

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This study is a cross-sectional analysis of the relationship between productive fluency and the use of formulaic sequences in the speech of highly proficient L2 learners. Two samples of learner speech were randomly drawn and analysed. Formulaic sequences were identified on the basis of two distinct procedures: a frequency-based, distributional approach which returned a set of recurrent sequences (n-grams) and an intuition and criterion-based, linguistic procedure which returned a set of phrasemes. Formulaic material was then removed from the data. Breakdown and speed fluency measures were obtained for the following types of speech: baseline (pre-removal), formulaic, non-formulaic (postremoval). The results show significant differences between baseline and post-removal fluency scores for both learners. Also, formulaic speech is produced more fluently than non-formulaic speech. However, the comparison of the fluency scores of n-grams and phrasemes returned inconsistent results with significant differences reported only for one of the samples.

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Prosody and idioms in English

Cited by 19 publications

References 4 publications

Formulaic Language in Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease: Complementary Effects of Subcortical and Cortical Dysfunction

Formulaic Language in Parkinson's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease: Complementary Effects of Subcortical and Cortical Dysfunction

Unruly intonation

Refining the methodology for investigating the relationship between fluency and the use of formulaic language in learner speech

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