Gender and prosody: speech acts of demand
This study endeavors to determine and describe the connection between a person’s gender and prosody of demands in spoken German. Prosody is one of the major phenomena reflecting a speaker’s intentions and the key tool used by speakers to reach their communicative goals in a conversation. This is especially the case when phrases with negative meaning are concerned. The possible influence of gender on prosody of demands seems to be a research-worthy problem. The article describes the experiment which...
Pragmatics and prosody: the analysis of oral speech as a principle of linguistic pragmatics
The paper views pragmatic meanings that have regular expression in language. Such meanings are 1) the illocutionary goal (illocutionary force) of an utterance, 2) the illocutionary function of a component of an utterance (theme and rheme of a statement, the known and the unknown of a question), 3) contrast and emphasis, and 4) the meaning of completeness/incompleteness of a speech act as a component of coherent discourse. It is shown that prosody is the main means of expressing pragmatic meanings...
