Pragmatics and prosody: the analysis of oral speech as a principle of linguistic pragmatics
... Language was used as a corpus for the study. The primacy of prosody over segmental means of expressing the most important pragmatic meanings is demonstrated, in particular, using the material of the previously insufficiently studied speech act of an echo-question. An echo-question is statistically often a short speech act with minimal segmental material (“What?” “Eh?”). Consequently, the completeness and accuracy of the analysis for various types of echo-questions can only be achieved through ...
