Stress onI

Abstract

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 onI. 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 stressedI), as well as turn taking (an initial-position effect), and contrast in a semantic sense (manifested in higher rates of stress under negative polarity).

Cross-language priming: A view from bilingual speech

“…The Spanish expressed 1sg pronoun yo (vs. an unexpressed mention) has been said to correspond to the English expressed pronoun I (vs. an unexpressed mention), or, alternatively, to an English stressed (vs. unstressed) I (Givón, 1983, p. 17; Payne, 1997, p. 43). But the inter-linguistic functional equivalence of grammatical morphemes or structure types is an empirical question (as noted by Otheguy, 2004, p. 177), and in fact the constraints on yo expression in Spanish, though similar, are not identical to those on expression and stress on I in English (Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2015; Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2014).…”

Two languages, one effect: Structural priming in spontaneous code-switching

“…Looking again at data from the SBCSAE, Travis and Torres Cacoullos (2014, p.373) found a rate of stressed I of 14% (163/1,133), setting aside formulaic units (discourse marker and quotative uses of I think and other collocations, as noted above) which, in general, lack stress on I . Multivariate analysis reveals similarities and differences in the linguistic conditioning of stressed I and expressed yo .…”

“…Further, without a clear operationalization of contrast, there is a great risk of circularity, whereby tokens are interpreted as contrastive because of the presence of yo , and then yo is described as a marker of that contrast (for operationalizations and tests of contrast, see Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2012, pp. 738–741; Travis & Torres Cacoullos, 2014, pp. 367–371).…”

“…And yet, the patterning of subject realization in English is rarely taken into account in studies adjudicating on contact effects. Here we draw on the results for English subject realization from Torres Cacoullos and Travis (2014) and Travis and Torres Cacoullos (2014), to develop such a statement of differences and similarities (see Torres Cacoullos & Travis, 2015b). The comparison demonstrates that the grammatical structure of Spanish subject expression (as revealed in the linguistic conditioning of variability) presents clear differences from that of English I realization.…”