Variation in the prosody of illocutionary adverbs

Abstract

Abstract Illocutionary adverbs such as frankly, honestly, and seriously have been commonly analysed as interpersonal (non-truth-conditional) modifiers that are characterised by syntactic and prosodic detachment from the ‘host’ they are associated with. However, recent accounts (e.g. Keizer 2018a) have shown that the formal (syntactic and prosodic) properties of such adverbs do not necessarily follow directly from the semantic non-truth-conditionality towards the main proposition. With respect to the prosodic realisation, such interpersonal adverbs can either be integrated into the respective utterance or detached from it (i.e. form a separate Intonational Phrase [IP]). The prosodic realisation is determined by the specific discourse-pragmatic features of such interpersonal adverbs, namely whether they are intended as separate (Subsidiary) Discourse Acts or whether they are part of a single Discourse Act at the Interpersonal Level (Keizer 2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2020). The aim of this article is to investigate these predictions by looking into the prosodic features of illocutionary adverb on the one hand and their discourse-pragmatic features on the other. It will be argued, based on the prosodic analysis of a set of spoken corpus data, that (i) the formation of separate IP is indeed triggered by the formation of Subsidiary Discourse Act, (ii) the formal properties (position and intonational pattern) are determined by the specific rhetorical function assigned to the respective Discourse Act, and (iii) the prosodic integration correlates with the adverbs being integral part of a single Discourse Act at the Interpersonal Level.