Prosody in recognizing dialogue-specific functions of speech acts. Evidence from Polish

Abstract

In this paper we evaluate the role of prosodic information in inferring dialogue-specific functions of speech acts. We report the results of an empirical study in which participants are exposed to recordings of certain utterances and, next, asked to recognize discursive contexts from which the heard utterances may come. The recorded utterances are quotations: staged utterances produced by speakers asked to read aloud dialogues specially constructed for the study. We analyse prosodic cues produced by recorded speakers and argue that they play a key role in depicting demonstrated target utterance. We assume that participants’ decisions manifest their implicit understanding of dialogue-specific functions of target utterances. The empirical part of our study shows that the efficiency rate of the prosodic cues produced by recorded speakers is 76%. We use the results of our prosodic analysis of recorded utterances to account for some cases of incorrect interpretations reported in the study.