Systemic Phonology - Recent Studies in English - Wendy L. Bowcher
Chapter 1: An investigation of how intonation helps signal information structure
Systemic Phonology - Recent Studies in English - Wendy L. Bowcher
Gerard O'Grady [+]
Cardiff University
Gerard O’Grady is a Senior Lecturer in Language and Communication (phonology) at the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University. His main research interests are intonation, spoken information structure, critical discourse analysis and linear grammars. He is active in the SFL community and co-organized the European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference and Workshop in 2009. He is also a co-founder of the LinC research network at Cardiff University with Tom Bartlett and Lise Fontaine. His recent publications include two books, A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse: The Intonation of Increments (2010) and Key Concepts in Phonetics and Phonology (2012), as well as the article ‘The unfolded imagining of Segolene Royal’ in the Journal of Pragmatics (2011). He co-edited the volumes, Systemic Functional Linguistics: Exploring Choice (Cambridge 2013) and Choice in Language: Applications in Text Analysis (Equinox 2013).
Description
There is widespread acceptance in the literature that speakers, operating in real time in pursuit of their individual communicative goals, use intonation to package their message into Given and New lexical elements. However, it is still not entirely clear what the terms Given and New refer to, nor how information structure relates to tonic and pre-tonic prominence. This chapter briefly examines the second in §1.2 before returning to the first one in §1.3.