Focus particles such as auch "also", nur "only" and sogar "even" form a closed word class and do not occur as immediate constituents in German. They usually have to adjoin to an associated focus ...constituent and are even occasionally referred to as function words. It is quite surprising that the focus particle ausgerechnet "of all X" (Peter kommt ausgerechnet heute "Peter is coming today of all days") also occurs as an independent utterance as in Peter kommt heute. Ausgerechnet! "Peter is coming today. Of all days!". The article describes this little studied (colloquial) use of ausgerechnet. It presents a detailed analysis of the focus particle ausgerechnet showing that it is an expressive item in the sense of Christopher Potts. The expressive semantics motivates its use as an utterance in analogy to exclamations with expressives such as the interjection Donnerwetter! "Oh dear!" or the adjective Toll! "great". The analysis is presented in a construction-based framework and illustrates the need to integrate core and peripheral grammatical phenomena.
•Participants shadow emotionally expressive and neutral productions•Comparison of speech toward human and Amazon Alexa model talkers•Evidence of alignment toward emotional style for duration, mean ...f0, and f0 variation•Acoustic differences across model stimuli predict alignment patterns•Largely similar patterns by female and male participants
This study tests whether individuals vocally align toward emotionally expressive prosody produced by two types of interlocutors: a human and a voice-activated artificially intelligent (voice-AI) assistant. Participants completed a word shadowing experiment of interjections (e.g., “Awesome”) produced in emotionally neutral and expressive prosodies by both a human voice and a voice generated by a voice-AI system (Amazon's Alexa). Results show increases in participants’ word duration, mean f0, and f0 variation in response to emotional expressiveness, consistent with increased alignment toward a general ‘positive-emotional’ speech style. Small differences in emotional alignment by talker category (human vs. voice-AI) parallel the acoustic differences in the model talkers’ productions, suggesting that participants are mirroring the acoustics they hear. The similar responses to emotion in both a human and voice-AI talker support accounts of unmediated emotional alignment, as well as computer personification: people apply emotionally-mediated behaviors to both types of interlocutors. While there were small differences in magnitude by participant gender, the overall patterns were similar for women and men, supporting a nuanced picture of emotional vocal alignment.
Paralanguage and ad hoc concepts Cruz, Manuel Padilla
Pragmatics : quarterly publication of the International Pragmatics Association,
09/2023, Volume:
33, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Ad hoc concept construction is regarded as a case of free pragmatic enrichment, so it is presented as a non-linguistically mandated process that is automatically accomplished during mutual parallel ...adjustment. Recent research suggests that this lexical pragmatic process may be marked and steered by various linguistic elements. These include evaluative morphemes, lexical and phrasal items adjacent to content words, and stylistic resources like repetition or rewording. This paper argues that paralanguage may fulfil a similar enacting function and finetune the conceptual representations arising from content words on the grounds of idiosyncratic, context-dependent features or shades, as well as propositional and non-propositional information about the speaker's psychological states. However, the paper restricts this function to expressive interjections, prosodic inputs like pitch, contrastive stress and pace or tempo, and gestural inputs such as language-like gestures, pantomimes and emblems. Conative interjections, intonation and proper gesticulation would be excluded from contributing to lexical pragmatic processes.
This paper investigates the Korean vocative interjection ya ‘hey’ in multiple turn-constructional unit (TCU) positions. A conversation analytic examination of telephone and face-to-face conversations ...shows that ya is an emerging discourse particle that plays an important role in the organization of turn-taking and stance-taking. At TCU-initial position speakers regularly use ya when departing from one topic to another or from one action/activity to another in a disjunctive manner. Here, speakers use ya to alert the recipient to the new topic or action they are pursuing. At TCU-final position, ya is used in turns that are not cohesive with another speaker's stance or with the speaker's own expectation. In this position the speaker retroactively marks their stance to the just-completed utterance with ya. Furthermore, the study finds that a ya which prosodically and syntactically belongs to both the prior TCU and the following TCU serves as a turn-constructional pivot extending the speakers' turn beyond the incipient point of possible completion. Overall, the findings illustrate the importance of understanding a form's usage as they occur through the progression of a turn and a sequence in naturally occurring talk, and contribute to our understanding of utterance (left/right) periphery phenomena.
•Korean vocative interjection ya ‘hey’ emerges as a discourse particle.•Ya occurs in multiple turn-constructional unit positions.•Ya plays an important role in the organization of turn-taking and stance-taking.•Ya serves as a turn-constructional pivot.
The purposes of this research are to find out the functions of the interjections functioned as pragmatic markers and what they indicate to, to find out which information the interjections denote and ...to find out how many functions the interjections functioned as pragmatic markers possibly have. The data are five different interjections taken from five different novels. The results of this research are concerning to the functions of the interjections functioned as pragmatic markers. Generally, the functions are utterance initial, attention marker and a response signal. Further, interjections functioned as pragmatic markers take form as attitude, feelings or both. The interjections denote given/old information, new information and both. The last result is that it is possible for interjections to have more than one function. To sum up, interjections functioned as pragmatic markers have roles and forms in discourses. In addition, interjections functioned as pragmatic markers denote information.
This essay reads the repetition of the interjection “Oh!” in the dialogue of The Wings of the Dove as revealing the pressure of the unsaid and unsayable in the late Jamesian novel. By asserting that ...this pressure is key to understanding the relationship between character, consciousness, and expression, this essay responds to literary scholarship that contends that Jamesian consciousness is not mimetic of human psychology. While this “anti-psychological” criticism is an important corrective to psychological determinism, such an approach underestimates the importance of the illegibility of character interiority to the linguistic skepticism at the heart of James’s portrayal of consciousness.
Linguistic theories and research indicate that unconscious processes should influence the content, but moreover also the way how things are expressed. As the first is well researched and the second ...is almost neglected, I want to assess how the writing style of a person is related to the implicit achievement motive and its two components hope of success (HS) and fear of failure (FF). Therefore, thematic apperception test/picture story exercise responses of 2942 persons were analyzed regarding the three writing style features (1) syntax, (2) nominal/verbal writing, and (3) function words. According to the assumptions, the results of two independent measures (Stanford Parser and LIWC) show that a verbal fluent writing style with simple syntax is associated with HS, whereby FF-motivated people show nominal writing with interjections, conjunctions, and complex punctuations.
E-headlines play an important role in shaping our interest towards reading different online articles and news. There are a lot of strategies and techniques of attracting the readers’ attention and ...one of them is the use of emotionally colored words. The aim of the present paper is to define the characteristics of emotionally colored words as lexical phenomena and to analyze special emotional word colorings in English e-headlines that are deliberately used to make an immediate impact on the readers’ choice. The famous western electronic newspapers and magazines like “Time”, “The Telegraph”, “The Guardian”, “The New York Times” and “The Sun” make the source platform of the current investigation.
Linguistic modality is one of the most complex categories, that is why its nature, meanings and ways of expression often become the object of various, at times, controversial theories. The present ...article described the concept of modality in the context of linguistic research. The purpose of this study was to identify the means of expressing author’s modality in Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Russian, determine their relations in intra- and inter-system contexts, and specify the significance of modality for typological studies of these languages. The comparative typological method was mainly used, along with observation, description, transformational analysis, and synthesis of theoretical and practical materials. The results revealed similar and distinctive elements in constructing modal relations in Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Russian. The study suggested various forms of expressing author’s modality in a literary text, including explicit means such as modal words, particles, moods and interjections, and implicit means like images, themes, ideas, concepts, symbols, and punctuation. In conclusion, the identification of multi-level means of expressing author’s modality in these languages contributed to deepening knowledge on the linguistic category of modality, comparative language study, and translation theory.
The article presents an analysis of actual, recorded social interactions between close familiars with the goal to describe discursive practices involved in showing engagement with the other party, or ...other‐attentiveness. Focusing on the deployment of the discourse markers “so” and “oh” in utterances that launch new conversational topics, the article demonstrates that “so” overwhelmingly prefaces other‐attentive topics, whereas “oh” prefaces self‐attentive topics. We consider the interactional implications of this distribution and how the basic meanings of these linguistic objects are employed in the service of communicating interpersonal involvement.
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