Prosody of Multiple Englishes Lecture Notes
Guest Lecture by Lucy Pickering at Language Matters Working Group,
April 17, 2015
Prosody: Suprasegmental features of sounds such as stress, intonation and tone
Multiple Englises (Kachru, 1992): The recognition that
English comprises of three different circles used by people of different
ethnicities
Inner circle: Native Speaker Model (e.g., American English, English English)
Outer circle: Institutionalized varieties of English (e.g.,
Indian English, Singaporean English)
Expanding Circle: Emerging varieties (e.g., China English,
Japanese English)
Functions of Intonation in English
Rising—Inclusive, shared understanding (e.g., The pope is Catholic?)
Falling---Assertive (e.g., Time is up)
Level----Neutral (e.g., The assignment is due on Monday
night)
The problem of prosodic cues in the speech of international teaching Assistants
No use of rising intonation for rapport-building similar to
Gumperz’ (1982) study of Indian waiters
No Contrastive stress
E.G.,
Zhuo: The phone number is 979 4225143
Wei: 9794224143?
Zhuo: No 979 4225143
The lack of contrastive stress led to linguistic penalty (Roberts & Campbell, 2006)
翼鵬
德州農工大學
乙未年孟夏書於潛龍齋