A Corpus-driven Study of Discourse Intonation: The Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (Prosodic)

by Cheng, Winnie; Greaves, Chris; Warren, Martin

• ISBN13: 9789027223067
• ISBN10: 9027223068
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-15
• Publisher: John Benjamins Pub Co

Summary

"The book is the first to apply David Brazil's Discourse Intonation systems (prominence, tone, key and termination) to the study of a corpus of authentic, naturally-occurring spoken discourses. The Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (prosodic) is made up of approximately one million words consisting of four sub-corpora of equal size, namely academic, conversation, business and public. The participants are all adults and typically have either Cantonese or English as their first language. The four Discourse Intonation systems are described in terms of how the system works and how they are manifested in the corpus, both across the sub-corpora and also across speakers in the corpus. The book is accompanied with a CD containing the prosodically transcribed corpus together with iConc which is the software designed and written specifically to interrogate the HKCSE (prosodic). The issues raised and discussed are all of importance in Conversation Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Discourse Intonation, Pragmatics, and Intercultural Communication."--BOOK JACKET.

Table of Contents

. Introduction

Discourse intonation systems

Transcribing the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE)

The iConc Concordancing Program

Tone Units

Prominence

Tones

Key and termination

Conclusions and implications

References

Appendices

Subject Index

Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.