Negation and prosody in British English: a study based on the London–Lund Corpus

Abstract

In this article, I am concerned with the prosodic realization of negative expressions in spoken British English. Negative expressions introduce new information into an utterance, and it has therefore long been assumed that speakers realize negative items with prosodic emphasis to highlight their importance with regard to the overall meaning of the sentence [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 74 (1983) 1155; Pierrehumbert, Janet, Hirschberg, Julia, 1990. The meaning of intonation contours in the interpretation of discourse. In: Cohen, P.R., Morgan, J., Pollack, M.E. (Eds.), Intentions in Communication, 271–312. Cambridge: MIT Press]. However, Yaeger-Dror [Language and Speech 28 (1985) 197; Language Variation and Change 9 (1997) 1] questioned that assumption and argued—based on her analysis of a corpus of American English—that speakers may de-emphasize and contract negative items if they express disagreement with a previous speaker's turn and thus threaten the face of the conversational partner. My quantitative analysis of a large amount of British English data tallies with Yaeger-Dror and shows that there is a strong tendency for negative items to be realized without prosodic emphasis. However, the fact that disagreements are indeed unlikely to be realized with prosodic prominence cannot be taken as the only explanation for the low rate of prominent negative items as disagreements are infrequent in my data. Rather, prominence on negatives can be shown to be register-dependent.