Negatives and Register, An Acoustic Study

本文将对不同语篇背景下的否定句进行韵律分析。否定在理论上和实践上都很重要，因为它们会对话语的意义产生至关重要的影响。“我自己做不到”之间的区别。和‘我自己能做。’是一个听者必须注意的问题，并做出适当的回应，因此，人们可能会声称，否定的内容应该突出地表达出来，以便被清楚地听到。这一主张在这里被称为认知突显原则，得到了语音研究的支持，在这些研究中，否定是在阅读句子中伴随着音调突显而产生的。相互矛盾的数据来自其他分析人士，他们已经证明，社交协议原则使说话者倾向于在对话中倾向于达成一致，并将分歧的迹象降至最低。这导致说话者不强调关键的负面信息，在许多互动情景中破坏了认知突出原则。因此，否定的使用为对比认知和互动原则提供了一个独特的视角。对否定词的韵律变异进行细致的分析可以丰富语言学理论，它可以确定在特定情况下这些原则中的一个在多大程度上支配语言使用，以及在多大程度上必须同时考虑这两个原则。对‘not’否定的分析还需要注意特定的社会语言学变量。这项研究将比较三种与社会协议关系截然不同的特定社会情景：协议接近强制性的情况将与不受欢迎的情况进行比较，以及被推定为中立的情况进行比较。对辩论、支持性对话和中性信息演讲的计算机辅助声学分析将允许对社会和语言参数进行统计多变量分析，使用韵律突出度作为主要语言变量，将社会情境和文化作为社会语言学变量。这些结果将引起理论和应用语言学家的兴趣，因为它们将解决理论和实践问题。有证据表明，文化和情景因素对被认为是“纯语言”变体的语言的影响，可能会改变未来语言学的研究方式。这一证据以后可以被那些希望为不同的社会和交互环境‘微调’语音识别和合成算法的人所利用，也可以被那些在特定的跨文化环境中教他人有效沟通的人利用。

A prosodic analysis will be carried out on 'not' negatives in different discourse settings. Negatives are both theoretically and practically important, since they critically influence the significance of an utterance. The difference between 'I can not do it myself.' and 'I can do it myself.' is one a listener must attend to, and respond to appropriately, so one may claim that the negative should be articulated prominently to be heard clearly. This claim, called here the Cognitive Prominence Principle, is supported by phonetic studies in which negatives were produced with pitch prominence in read sentences. Conflicting data come from other analysts who have shown that a Social Agreement Principle predisposes speakers to prefer agreement in conversation and minimize signs of disagreement. This results in speakers not emphasizing the critical negative information, undermining the Cognitive Prominence Principle in many interactive situations. Thus, the use of negatives provides a unique insight into contrasting cognitive and interactional principles. Close analysis of prosodic variation on negatives can enrich linguistic theory by determining the degree to which one of these principles dominates language use in a given situation, and the degree to which both must be taken into consideration. Analysis of 'not' negation also requires attention to specific sociolinguistic variables. The study will compare three specific social situations with contrasting relationships to social agreement: situations in which agreement is near mandatory will be compared with those in which it is dispreferred, and those in which it is presumed to be neutralized. Computer assisted acoustic analysis of debates, supportive conversations, and neutrally informational speech will permit a statistical multivariate analysis of both social and linguistic parameters, using prosodic prominence as the primary linguistic variable, and social situation and culture as sociolinguistic variables. The results will be of interest to both theoretical and applied linguists because they will address both theoretical and practical questions. Evidence for the influence of cultural and situational factors on what has been considered a 'purely linguistic' variant may alter the way linguistics will be done in the future. This evidence can later be utilized by those who wish to 'fine tune' speech recognition and synthesis algorithms for different social and interactive environments, and by those who teach others to communicate effectively in specific intercultural settings.