Chapter 5
The Sociophonetics of Prosodic Contours on NEG
in Three Language Communities: Teasing apart
Sociolinguistic and Phonetic InÀ uences on Speech
Malcah Yaeger-Dror, University of Arizona; Tania Granadillo,
University of Western Ontario; Shoji Takano, Hokusei Gakuen
University; Lauren Hall-Lew, Oxford University^1
- Introduction
Negatives provide cognitively critical information and are also interactively
signi¿ cant. The present study compares the prosodic realization of nega-
tives in three languages, and in two social settings for each language. The
study will provide evidence for three loci of prosodic variation in negatives
as they are used in amicable social interactions and in informative newscasts
in American English, Latin American Spanish,^2 and Japanese. Comparative
evidence from adversarial interactions will be cited where relevant.
1.1 Lang uage
Each of these three languages shows unique patterns for how prominence is
acoustically accomplished (Pierrehumbert and Beckman 1988; Hirst and Di
Cristo 1998; Grabe et al. 2003; Jun 2005). Each has its own default negative
morphology with a given default syntactic position, and it is that most com-
mon form of negation that will be studied here. Rather than refer to each spe-
ci¿ c lexical item in this discussion, each language’s ‘default’ lexical negative
will be referred to as NEG.
1.2 Social situation
Within a given linguistic community, prosody varies radically with the social
situation. This chapter will discuss parallel results for the three languages in