Universität zu Köln

Lindstädt, Hauke (2024). Can you believe that? The prosody of non-genuine polar questions in English. Masters thesis, Universität zu Köln.

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Abstract

This thesis deals with the general question, how and to which degree functional-pragmatic aspects of human language are reflected in speech prosody. In an exploratory corpus study I analysed and compared different kinds of non-genuine polar questions in English. Polar questions are such questions, that typically can be answered by yes or no. Non-genuine polar questions, however, do not primarily seek an answer at all, but perform other conversational functions. The kinds of non-genuine polar questions under investigation can be described as requests for action, rhetorical questions and topic introductions. Ca. 100 instances of each of these three utterance types were collected from American television programmes and analysed using ProPer (Albert et al. 2023), a method, that takes into account both fundamental frequency and periodic energy. While there is no one-to-one correspondance between discourse function and prosodic form, small, but significant differences between the utterance types could be observed. These differences, however, are differences in degree, rather than categorical in nature.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters thesis)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Lindstädt, Hauke hlindst1@uni-koeln.de UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-726328
Series Name at the University of Cologne:	Papers on Prominence
Volume:	22
Date:	2024
Language:	English
Faculty:	Collaborative Research Centers Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Fächergruppe 1: Kunstgeschichte, Musikwissenschaft, Medienkultur und Theater, Linguistik, IDH > Institut für Linguistik > Phonetik Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Fächergruppe 3: Deutsche Sprache und Literatur > Institut für Deutsche Sprache und Literatur I Collaborative Research Centers > CRC 1252: Prominence in Language Collaborative Research Centers > CRC 1252: Prominence in Language > TP A01 Collaborative Research Centers > CRC 1252: Prominence in Language > TP C09
Subjects:	Language, Linguistics
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language ProPer, periodic energy, non-genuine polar questions, speech-act theory, illocutionary force, TV News Archive English
Date of oral exam:	2024
Referee:	Name Academic Title Grice, Martine Prof. Dr.
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/72632