The Sociophonetics of Prosodic Contours on NEG 157Spanish, although even in English prominence did not peak over 90% as
it had for the isolated sentence readers (O’Shaughnessy and Allen 1983) or
the news re-readers (Hirschberg 1990) discussed earlier. In English 78%
of Newscast tokens were prominent, in Spanish 58%, and in Japanese 39%
(Yaeger-Dror et al 2002, 2003, Takano 2008).
The different CallFriend corpora were run separately, and then the Call-
Friend and News subcorpora were run together (for the Japanese Corpus).
Situation (News vs. CallFriend) is consistently signi¿ cant across all corpora,
but for the English and Spanish corpora we determined that it was inappropri-
ate to run the two situations together.
With regard to footing, the newscasters’ NEG were uniformly coded as
Informative. All other results on the table are for CF calls.
4.2 Morphology
As implied in the discussion of morphology, we expected that full not tokens
(coded as F on Table 5.4e) are overall signi¿ cantly more li kely to be prominent
than contracted not (coded as C) in American English conversations; how-
ever, within the CF corpus, there were so few Full tokens in the CF declara-
tive sentences that the factor group did not enter the CF-only regressions, and
are not found on Table 5.7.
On the other hand, there is more variation within the Japanese CF calls:
the Japanese cliticized-nai (i.e., auxiliary nai [coded as X on Table 5.4j]) are
more likely to be prominent (.55) than the remaining morphologically inde-
pendent “nai” (i.e., nominals, adjectives, adjectival nouns + “nai” [coded as
N, A, D respectively on Table 5.4j]) (.40). Further analysis shows that this
distinction is noteworthy in “Informative” footing of -nai: the “cliticized” nai
tends to receive more prominence (36%) than the “morphologically indepen-
dent” -nai (21%). We infer that this systematic pattern is closely linked to the
degree of perceptual salience of the negative -nai in different morphological
positions and the speaker’s (perhaps tacit) intent to augment communicative
ef¿ ciency in telephone conversations in which verbal signals are the only
medium to rely on. Note that the same tendency is also observed in more
information-laden registers such as news broadcast and political debates data
as well (Takano 2008).
Given that—as shown on Table 5.4s—there are no morphological NEG
variants considered in Spanish, morphology is irrelevant to the discussion of
Spanish variation.