PROSODY IN ORAL LANGUAGE – Stress, Intonation, and Pause/Timing

In Linguistics Prosody the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Thus, as it is part of the oral language, we may consider many more posibilities of “manipulation” the sound of a word, a sequence of words or whole sentences as if they are written. I will consider only stress and intonation for the purpose of this entry.

In Discourse, Consciousness, and Time (1994), Wallace Chafe gives us plenty of information about the term prosody: it “embraces a variety of perceptual and physical properties of sound, including pitch, loudness, timing, voice quality, and the presence or absence of vocalization itself.” Further: we can “approach prosody from the perspective of a phonetician, using displays of frequency, intensity, and duration as the primary data for understanding what language does with these aspects of sound” (page 56). A little later, Chafe states that language is segmented into spurts, or “intonation units” (page 57).

Steven Pinker further states in his book The Language Instinct (2007) that we continuously change pitch over the course of a sentence. This process is called Intonation: “Intonation is controlled in sarcasm, emphasis, and an emotional tone of voice such as anger or cheeriness” (page 160).

In the TV series Cougar Town, episode 4 from season 2 “The Damage you've done” (min. 11:20) Travis, previous to going to college agreed with his still-girlfriend Kylie to have a freer relationship and see others when they're not together. When he comes home and meets up with her, he suddenly realises Kylies new “kissing-behavior”. So he asks her why she is biting him while kissing:

Travis: […] Well, it was a little scary. Where is this coming from? Are you seeing this guy from before?

Kylie: I told you. I'm not seeing...him.
Travis: You stress the word him as if there were other hims.




Through this example, we can observe how Kylie uses two different aspects of prosody: stress of the word “him” and a slight pause immediately before the emphasised word. In this case, we can certainly say that it is done on purpose to make the listener notice the little lie behind the utterance. As if saying “well...not him, but another guy/him”.
We could even see it as an attempt to soften what is being told in a second, or to warn about something the listener won't like a bit.
I also find Travis' answer quite amusing, especially when uttering the plural of “him”, also emphasised, as if being aware of the lie and of the strangeness in using a plural for this pronoun. Of course, if you watch the episode, you can observe additional features surrounding the utterance, such as facial and body gestures, which also give away much information to the “simply” connected words.
Besides, Chafe considers the use of “well” at the beginning of a sentence to be an example of a regulatory intonation unit. In his book he also speaks about substantive and fragmentary intonation units (page 63).

Obviously, there is much more to Prosody and all its components. We will see them as I will be finding some examples...