When “okay” is not okay: Acoustic characteristics of single-word prosody conveying reluctance

Zyl, Marianne Van; Hanekom, Johan J.

doi:10.1121/1.4769399

Cited by 34 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Instead, we concentrate on attitudinal aspect (e.g., (b) above). A similar approach is taken by van Zyl and Hanekom (2012). They found the affirmative cue word okay with a neutral agreement to differ prosodically from okay with reluctant agreement within the same discourse position.…”

Section: Aims Questions and Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 84%

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The Prosody of the Czech Discourse Marker ‘Jasně': An Analysis of Forms and Functions

2017

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Words like yeah, okay and (al)right are fairly unspecific in their lexical semantics, and not least for this reason there is a general tendency for them to occur with highly varied and expressive prosodic patterns across languages. Here we examine in depth the prosodic forms that express eight pragmatic functions of the Czech discourse marker jasně, including resignation, reassurance, surprise, indifference or impatience. Using a collection of 172 tokens from a corpus of scripted dialogues by 30 native speakers, we performed acoustic analyses, applied classification algorithms and solicited judgments from native listeners in a perceptual experiment. There appeared to be multi-parametric differences between jasně realizations in terms of their F0, timing and intensity patterns, which gave rise to generally consistent form-function mappings. For example, resignation seems to be realized with a falling intonation contour, relatively slow tempo, long wordinitial consonant and a short word-final vowel. Although the most significant prosodic parameters used for clustering analysis involved segment durations, all pragmatic functions were expressed by patterns of multiple features.

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Section: Aims Questions and Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 84%

“…In accordance with the claims of Hirschberg and Litman (1993), Ward (2006), van Zyl andHanekom (2012), we assume that the answer to questions (1) is positive. The same applies to question (2).…”

Section: Aims Questions and Assumptionsmentioning

confidence: 97%

The Prosody of the Czech Discourse Marker ‘Jasně': An Analysis of Forms and Functions

2017

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“…However, these works all support the–for us–central point that prosody extends far beyond individual syllables or segments into the broader set of organizations supporting language as an embodied behavior that extends across space and time. Changes in prosody can add meaningful valence to single-word utterances (Filipe, Branco, Frota, Castro, & Vicente, 2014; van Zyl & Hanekom, 2013). The suprasegmental organization of prosody might wrap meaningfully around single-word utterances, but perhaps even such brief speech streams allow prosody sufficient time to wrap meaningfully around individual phonemes – and what could be more difficult, around individual phonemes out of proper order.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosody Improves Detection of Spoonerisms Versus Both Sensible and Nonsense Phrases

2017

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Prosody is the pattern of inflection, pitch, and intensity that communicates emotional meaning above and beyond the individual meanings of lexical items and gestures during spoken language. Research has often addressed prosody extending most clearly across multiple speech chunks and carrying properties specific to individual speakers and individual intents. However, prosody exerts effects on intended meaning even for relatively brief speech streams with minimal syntactic cues. The present work seeks to test whether prosody may actually clarify the intended meaning of a two-word phrase even when the basic phonemic sequence of the words is distorted. Thirty-eight undergraduate participants attempted to correctly categorize auditorily presented two-word phrases as belonging to one of three categories: nonsensical phrases; sensible phrases; and spoonerisms. Mixed Poisson modeling of cumulative accuracy found a significant positive interaction of prosody with phrase type indicating that conversational prosody made participants 8.27% more likely to accurately detect spoonerisms. Prosody makes spoken-language comprehension of two-word phrases more robust to distortions of phonemic sequence.

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“…In contrast, other functions require more sophisticated multi-factor analyses for identifying the best disambiguating features. Van Zyl and Hanekom (2012) discovered that okay with a neutral agreement differs in prosody from okay with a reluctant agreement in the same discourse position. Gonen et al (2015) and Hirschberg and Litman (1987 , 1993) found that prosodic information facilitates the hearer distinguishing a discourse marker from its literal counterpart.…”

Section: Review Of Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the Interaction Between Prosody and Pragmatics Quantitatively: A Case Study of the Chinese Discourse Marker ni zhidao (“You Know”)

Shan

2021

Front. Psychol.

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This study briefly describes the prosodic and pragmatic characteristics of the discourse marker ni zhidao (“you know”) in spoken Chinese. It mainly explores the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics using instrumental methods. It is the first attempt to use acoustic and statistical analysis to examine the prosodic parameters and prosody-pragmatics interaction of a Chinese discourse marker. The corpus includes 71 interview conversations totaling more than 30 h, in which 490 discourse marker tokens of ni zhidao were found. Ni zhidao mainly fulfilled four broad pragmatic functions of initiating a topic when occurring sentence-initially, of holding the floor when appearing within clauses, of marking coherence when making its presence between clauses, and of projecting attitudes and feelings when showing up sentence-finally. Drawing on the algorithm of random forest in R, the acoustic and statistical analysis of the performance of ni zhidao in these four functions showed that its prosodic features, including duration, tempo, pre-pause, post-pause, F0, and intensity, significantly relate to and thus imply its pragmatic functions, that the interaction between its prosody and pragmatics can be modeled statistically, and that the established pragmatics classification model based on prosody can be utilized to predict the pragmatics of ni zhidao. These findings seem to strengthen the hypothesis that prosodic variables play a role in deciphering the different pragmatic functions of ni zhidao. This study uses prosodic evidence to more objectively reveal not only the part of ni zhidao in dynamically constructing and embodying specific contexts but also its communicative functions and the underlying meta-pragmatic awareness behind it. This study breaks through the limitations of traditional discourse marker research, which mainly relies on context and discourse characteristics for subjective reasoning.

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When “okay” is not okay: Acoustic characteristics of single-word prosody conveying reluctance

Cited by 34 publications

References 16 publications

The Prosody of the Czech Discourse Marker ‘Jasně': An Analysis of Forms and Functions

The Prosody of the Czech Discourse Marker ‘Jasně': An Analysis of Forms and Functions

Prosody Improves Detection of Spoonerisms Versus Both Sensible and Nonsense Phrases

Investigating the Interaction Between Prosody and Pragmatics Quantitatively: A Case Study of the Chinese Discourse Marker ni zhidao (“You Know”)

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