10 Interactive lexis:
prominence and paradigms
Mike McCarthy
This chapter is in two parts. The first part attempts to place Brazil’s (1985)
view of prominence within the context of studies of stress and tonicity,
especially where such studies seem unable to resolve difficulties and anomalies
in data. This is done in order to juxtapose a series of views on the relationships
between salient intonational phenomena such as accent and nucleus placement,
and attempts to explain such features in terms of ‘given’ and ‘new’ information,
with Brazil’s own view, which is seen as a unified response to such phenomena
that removes anomalies. This is a necessary exordium to the second part of
the chapter, which will demonstrate, with real data, that Brazil’s view of
prominence as a realization of significant choice not only dissipates anomalies
and red herrings but offers a powerful model for the analysis of the negotiation
of lexical meaning in real-time discourse. The chapter will support Brazil’s
view that when speakers choose their words, they do so within a projection
of a context of interaction, and that prominent and non-prominent matter
represents the speaker’s choice whether to label items as non-selected common
or shared ground or as open-ended, selected matter, yet to be established as
common ground. The data referred to will underline the interactive dimension
of lexical meaning rather than its inherent or stable features which semanticists
have traditionally fixed upon. The data will, it is hoped, show that prominence
is a major vehicle for realizing these interactive meanings.
PART I: TONICITY AND PROMINENCE
Prominence is central to Brazil’s systematic account of intonation in
English, both as the domain in which tonicity operates and as the realization
of the existential paradigm, which will be further discussed in Part II.
For Brazil, prominence is the feature attached in speech to ‘syllables
that a hearer can recognize as being in some sense more emphatic than
the others’ (1985:18). Prominence, though attached to syllables, gives
significance to words in any discourse and the implications of prominence
are explored on the basis of ‘words having or not having a single prominent
syllable’ (1985:38).