The Sociophonetics of Prosodic Contours on NEG 159allows most prosodic freedom as well. It is also quite clear that the prosodic
variation in all languages analyzed to date supports the Cognitive Promi-
nence Principle in informative situations or sentence reading, but supports
the Social Agreement Principle in interactive situations.
The analysis of prosodic variation appears to be a productive technique
for determining distinctions among situations, both within and across cul-
tures. The dissimilarities between cultures (even cultures that we would
initially expect to be quite similar) are at least as great as the distinctions
between different registers within a single culture. We had initially expected
that confrontational registers—like political debates and readings of literary
dialogue—would be quite different from polite social occasions—like the
conversations-for-class-consumption between two friends. In fact, the polite
registers used less pitch prominence than the confrontational registers in both
cultures. However, the differences between the American and Spanish ver-
sions of News or CallFriend were as salient as the differences between the
situations within each culture.
4.4 Footing
Table 5.7 shows that both English and Japanese conversationalists’ supportive
negatives (S) are signi¿ cantly more likely to be prominent than those found
in informative (I) or remedial (R) turns—with factor weights of .89>.47>.44
for Japanese Supportive>Informative>Remedial tokens, and .66>.50<.52,
for English. This difference was not signi¿ cant for the Spanish speakers, for
whom there were so few prominent tokens that the difference between the
footing of the different turns was not signi¿ cant.^20
Yaeger-Dror et al. (2002, 2003) and Takano (2008) both found that the
reverse is the case for political debates—that is, the remedial negatives (R)
are signi¿ cantly more likely to be prominent than the Supportive NEG both in
political debates (Yaeger-Dror et al. 2002, 2003; Takano 2008) and in political
“discussion” programs (Hedberg and Yaeger-Dror 2008; Takano 2008). The
Goldvarb results for debates are on Table 5.8, with Remedial tokens (R) favor-
ing prominence more than either Informative (I) or Supportive (S) tokens.
Table 5.8 Factor Weights for Footing in Political Debates in English and Japanese
FACTOR GP SIGNIFICANCE SPA N I SH JAPANESE ENGLISH
cf. Table 5.5 footing ns (S) I<R S<I<R
Debate Factor Wts — - .42<.55 .22<.46<.56 (all)