The Sociophonetics of Prosodic Contours on NEG 163use prominence more than half the time. Japanese speakers are much more
carefully attuned to the situational footing than either the US or Latin Ameri-
can speakers and vary prominence with the footing much more radically.
Obviously, many opportunities for misunderstanding arise in intercultural
communication and a more nuanced approach to foreign language teaching
would doubtless have an effect not only on classroom presentation but on
cross-cultural communication in general. It is clear that careful analysis of
negation in different cultures will have an impact on language teaching, on
how well people from different cultures communicate in the real world, and
on how computer systems interpret speech, as well as on linguistic theory.
These studies will be useful not just for our own theoretical research, but
for the applied ¿ elds of automatic speech recognition and synthesis, as well
as for the pedagogy of foreign languages so that learners will sound more like
actual conversationalists, and less like classroom drones.
6.2 Socio-theoretical rami¿ cations
Coupland (2001) isolates two types of register variation. One he refers to as
“dialect style” and the other as “ways of speaking.” He hypothesized that
there is a clear distinction between those variables which are linguistic (“dia-
lect style”) and those which are inÀ uenced by cultural rules for interaction
(“ways of speaking”). The use of negation is relevant to both and both must
be taken into consideration to permit an adequate analysis of negation strate-
gies, although the present study has considered only the importance of “ways
of speaking” to this variation.
Coupland also suggests that both “dialect style” and “ways of speaking”
vary relative to three goals: instrumental, identity, and relational. Further
study will be needed to substantiate claims that variation in negation strate-
gies occurs relative to each of these three “goals.”
Notes
1 This study was begun with NSF# sbs9809884, and the Spanish segment of the
analysis was supported by a UA SBSRI Grant. Work on the political panels was
facilitated by grants from the Kennedy Library and the White House Historical
Foundation. None of the analysis of news broadcasts or CallFriend would have
been possible without the assistance of Mark Liberman and Dave Graff of LDC