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thesis, an empirical study of enjambment, Tom Barney (1990) found
ample empirical support for this assumption. This he did without
having heard of my work before. I have adapted his techniques to a
wide range of problems discussed in my 1977 book. My own way in
this empirical research is to collect judgments from students, colleagues
or my research associates whether the performer was successful in
conveying, e.g., the conflicting aspects of an enjambment. And if
possible, I try to compare alternative possiblities. Then I am looking for
cues in the phonetic structures of the recordings, trying to find support
for the intuitive judgments.
Barney relied in his research on a paper by Gerry Knowles (1991),
in which he investigated the nature of tone-groups. Knowles
distinguished internally defined prosodic patterns and external
discontinuities at the tone-group boundaries. The former consist in
some consistent Fused
in ordinary speech; the latter are temporal 0pattern ("intonation pattern"--in plain English)
discontinuation (pause), pitch
discontinuation (a sudden change in F0) and segmental discontinuation
(that is, in normal speech the articulation of adjacent words is
overlapping; when there is no overlap, it may count as discontinuity,
even if there is no pause). Glottal stops in words beginning with a
vowel, or word-final stop releases too may indicate segmental
discontinuation (see below). This would be the most evasive type of
discontinuity. "The important distinction that seems to be emerging is
between boundaries with or without pauses". In what follows, I shall
explore how these correlates of tone-group boundaries can be exploited
as conflicting cues for the perceptual accommodation of the conflicting
patterns of speech and versification.
One of the most conspicuous kinds of segmental discontinuity is the
prolongation of a phoneme or of a syllable at the end of an utterance,
announcing (very much like fermatain music) that the preceding unit
has come to an end. Prolongation is, in fact, a double-edged
phenomenon, that is, in different contexts it has different, sometimes
even opposite, effects. From a perceptual point of view, prolongation
indicates lack of forward movement. Therefore, when we have reason
to suppose that it occurs at the end of some perceptual unit, it will be
perceived as reinforcing the sense of rest;when it occurs in the middle
of some forward movement, it is perceived as an arrest,arousing
strong desire for change. While this is most useful in the kind of
research I am engaged in, there is a big problem with this notion. There
is no standard by which we can determine whether a phoneme or
sequence of phonemes is longer or shorter than ought to be.
Consequently, one must rely in this respect on one's intuitive
judgment, or some roundabout reasoning about measurements and
comparisons.
Expressive Functions of Vocal Style
For certain purposes, speakers may deviate from the "ordinary"
articulation of phonetic cues: they may, for instance, overarticulate,
underarticulate, or distort certain phonemes or phonetic cues. The
Hungarian linguist Iván Fónagy is the greatest authority regarding the
expressive functions of vocal style. Instead of getting entangled in
elaborate expositions, I will briefly present the issue via one of
Fónagy's illuminating examples.
According to the evidence of facial cinematography, Hungarian
or French actresses pronounce /i/ with rounded lips when they
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