Prosodic Parenthesis and Prosodic Integration: A Case Study in Turkish
Güliz Güneş
University of Groningen
g.gunes@rug.nl
It is generally assumed that parentheticals are intonationally separate units from their host
clause (see Dehé 2007 and references within). However, recent research suggests that
there may be cases where such separation does not take place and the parenthetical may
be prosodically integrated to parts of its host clause. This study discusses this issue with
reference to Turkish data (1-3). Although parentheticals in Turkish typically exhibit
separate prosodic isolation from the surrounding host clause contours, it is illustrated that,
in some cases, Turkish parentheticals are prosodically integrated to the closest tonebearing prosodic unit of the host (3). Thus, it is concluded that parentheticals’ prosodic
(in)dependence is subject to variation.
A speech production study was conducted native speakers of standard Turkish
(n:8). For the experimental study, speakers uttered the target sentences with a longer
(yanılmıyorsam ‘if I am not mistaken’) and a shorter (bence ‘for me’) parenthetical
inserted into three different positions: sentence-initial, medial and final. The findings are
as follows:
First, a sentence-medial parenthetical (1) is isolated from its host. Hence,
sentence-medial parentheticals, though not in their phonology but in their phrasing
pattern, resemble the ‘prototypical parentheticals’ described by Dehé (2007).
(1)
(1)’
/′Subject// ˇif I am not mistaken// `Object Verb/
/′Subject// ˇfor me// `Object Verb/
Second, sentence-initial root clause elements and sentence-initial parentheticals (2) (no
matter how long or short) exhibit similar phrasing properties. In canonical SOV order,
Topic-bearing S and nuclear focus-bearing O are phrased separately. S shows a rising
terminal, and so is phrased separately from the following part (LH), whilst O shows a rise
preceded by a low tone (LH) pattern phrased with a following post-focal de-accented
(tail) V. Similarly, a parenthetical that precedes the S (pSOV) bear a very similar
intonation pattern to the sentence initial Subject without any particular tonal patterns
indicative of its syntactic isolation.
(2)
(2)’
/′If I am not mistaken/ ′Subject//`Object Verb/
/′For me/ ′Subject//`Object Verb/
Third, sentence-final (post-focal) root clause elements and sentence-final parentheticals
(long/short) (3) exhibit similar phrasing properties. In particular, just like post-focal root
elements, utterance-final parentheticals are a leveled continuation of the preceding tonal
contour showing no boundary markers such as a preceding pause or a prominent H tone.
Therefore, we analyze them as ‘tails’ to the host domain in the sense of Crystal (1969).
(3)
(3)’
/′Subject // `Object Verb leveled if I am not mistaken/
/′Subject // `Object Verb leveled for me/
Our findings provide further evidence for the existence of a distinction between
prosodically integrated parenthesis (Bolinger 1989, among many others) and prosodically
isolated parenthesis (Dehé 2007, among others). However, the results show that the
constraints that act upon the prosodic isolation or integration of parentheticals are
language specific. Constraints on phrasing of Turkish parentheticals referring to the
whole sentence are determined not by their length but by their distribution in the
sentence.
References
Bolinger, D. 1989. Intonation and its uses: Melody in grammar and discourse. Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press.
Crystal, D. 1969. Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English. London: CUP
Dehé, N. 2007. 'The relation between syntactic and prosodic parenthesis', in N. Dehé and Y.
Kavalova (eds.) Parentheticals, Linguistics today 106, Amsterdam John Benjamins.
Erguvanlı, E., 1979. The function of word order in Turkish grammar. Ph.D. Thesis. UCLA