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Prosody and Narrative Structure in Varieties of Low German and Alemannic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2006

Erik Schleef
Erik Schleef
Affiliation:
University of Michigan Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, 3110 Modern Languages Building, 812 E. Washington, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275 eschleef@umich.edu
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Abstract

This study analyzes prosodic cues and discourse markers in varieties of Low German and Alemannic in order to uncover how narrative structure is cued lexically and prosodically in different varieties of German. Intonational boundary tones, discourse markers, and pauses turned out to be sufficient to cue discourse units at different levels. Although the varieties under discussion use the same type of linguistic features, there are important differences of detail in pause distribution and categorization, functions of certain pitch contours, and the use and function of discourse markers, so that the particular set of contextualization cues is quite different for the various levels of discourse in each variety.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , December 2003 , pp. 325 - 357
Copyright
© 2003 Society for Germanic Linguistics

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