Negatives and Register, An Acoustic Study

本文将对不同语篇背景下的“非”否定进行韵律分析。否定词在理论和实践上都很重要，因为它们对话语的意义有着决定性的影响。“我自己做不到”和“我自己做不到”之间的区别。和“我可以自己做。”这是一个听众必须注意的问题，并做出适当的回应，所以有人可能会说，否定的语气应该被清晰地表达出来。这一说法在这里被称为认知突出原则，它得到了语音研究的支持，在语音研究中，否定句在阅读句子中会随着音高的突出而产生。来自其他分析人士的矛盾数据表明，社会协议原则使说话者倾向于在对话中达成一致，并尽量减少分歧的迹象。这导致说话者不强调关键的负面信息，在许多互动情况下破坏了认知突出原则。因此，否定词的使用为对比认知和互动原则提供了独特的见解。仔细分析否定的韵律变化可以丰富语言学理论，通过确定在给定情况下这些原则中的一个在多大程度上主导语言使用，以及在多大程度上必须考虑到这两个原则。对“不”否定的分析还需要注意特定的社会语言学变量。该研究将比较三种特定的社会情境与社会协议的对比关系：将近乎强制性的协议情境与不受欢迎的协议情境以及被认为是中性的协议情境进行比较。计算机辅助声学分析辩论、支持性对话和中性信息语音将允许对社会和语言参数进行统计多元分析，使用韵律突出作为主要语言变量，社会情境和文化作为社会语言学变量。研究结果将引起理论语言学家和应用语言学家的兴趣，因为它们将解决理论和实践问题。文化和情境因素对被认为是“纯语言学”变体的影响的证据可能会改变语言学未来的研究方式。这些证据以后可以被那些希望为不同的社会和互动环境“微调”语音识别和合成算法的人，以及那些教他人在特定的跨文化环境中有效沟通的人所利用。

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.