Intonational Prominence On Negatives in English

Abstract

Negatives are generally used to express a disagreement with a preceding turn in a conversation (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974) and therefore provide "new" information relative to the immediately preceding turn. Consequently, current linguistic theory concurs with recent phonetic analyses which have shown that negatives will generally be intonationally prominent. However, sociologists maintain that speakers will generally avoid disagreement with other parties to an interaction. An analysis of several conversations shows that in many situations the interactional rules take precedence over the linguistic rules: Disagreement with some other speaker is generally realized with reduced amplitude and non-prominent fundamental frequency on the negative words, while disagreement with self or agreement with a previous speaker is realized with prominent fundamental frequency on the negative, often accompanied by prominent amplitude.