Prosodic Marking in Speech Repair

Abstract

Spontaneous self-corrections in speech pose a communication problem; the speaker must make clear to the listener not only that the original Utterance was faulty, but where it was faulty and how the fault is to be corrected. Prosodic marking of corrections making the prosody of the repair noticeably different from that of the original utterance offers a resource which the speaker can exploit to provide the listener with such information. A corpus of more than 400 spontaneous speech repairs was analysed, and the prosodic characteristics compared with the syntactic and semantic characteristics of each repair. Prosodic marking showed no relationship at all with the syntactic characteristics of repairs. Instead, marking was associated with certain semantic factors: repairs were marked when the original utterance had been actually erroneous, rather than simply less appropriate than the repair; and repairs tended to be marked more often when the set of items encompassing the error and the repair was small rather than when it was large. These findings lend further weight to the characterization of accent as essentially semantic in function. 1. Some determinants of intonational marking in self-corrections At least two people are in trouble when a speaker interrupts the flow of speech in order to make a self-correction. The first person is the speaker himself* who apparently became aware of some unclarity or error in what he just said. The second person is a listener who is confronted with an abrupt break, and with the task to find out whether what is going to follow is just a continuation, as after a mere hesitation, or whether it is a repair of something said previously. In the latter case, moreover, she has to find out what the reparandum is, and to replace it by the appropriate items in the correction. This will be called the listener's continuation problem. * For ease of reference we will in the following treat the speaker, i.e. the trouble maker, as male and the listener, i.e. the victim, as female. JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 205-217 205