This seminar will be conducted by 3-hour online Zoom sessions for four days: Saturday, September 26, Sunday, September 27, Saturday, October 3, and Sunday, October 4 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. (JST). Students taking this seminar for credit must attend all four days. Students can add/drop this seminar course by 13:00 on Saturday, September 26.
The pre sign-up (or course registration for those who are taking this seminar for credit) is required for anybody attending the public session on Saturday, September 26 from 9:00 to 12:00. The sign-up process must be completed through "Distinguished Lecturer Series Seminar Sign-Up Form" that is available on TUJ Grad Ed website. The sign-up deadline is Friday, September 25, at 12:00 p.m. The public session Zoom link will be provided to those people who completed the online sign-up (or course registration) process by 18:00 on Friday, September 25.
Prosody (often interchangeably referred to as “suprasegmentals”) collectively refers to the properties of speech which involve variations in pitch, loudness, tempo, and rhythm (Crystal, 2008). The physical correlates of prosody allow us to study speech-associated features of temporal fluency, word stress, sentence prominence, and intonation. Prosody is pragmatic in nature (Brazil, 1997; Kermad, 2021; Knowles, 2016; Ladd, 1996; Levis, 2016; Pickering, 2018) and communicates meaning far beyond the surface-level of an utterance. Pragma-prosodic interpretations crucially depend on the interaction between a speaker and a listener; therefore, the choices a speaker makes and how those choices are perceived by a listener must be considered in tandem, merging prosodic and pragmatic theoretical frameworks.
For second language (L2) speakers, pragma-prosodic production and comprehension do not come intuitively. While an L2 utterance may be perfectly target-like at the lexico-grammatical level, if the prosodic performance does not meet a listener’s expectations, the utterance may still be perceived as pragmatically inappropriate. Furthermore, in comprehension, language learners may not be able to detect how prosodic cues alter the meaning of an utterance, especially when the pragmatic force is not transparent with the linguistic form.
This seminar will therefore begin with an introduction to prosody and its pragmatic nature, situating the discussion within a survey of current L2 research by highlighting crucial findings and methodological considerations. The next portions of the seminar will lead attendees through a presentation of David Brazil’s (1997) prosodic framework alongside a Praat New Tab workshop to provide theoretically-informed hands-on training in conducting prosodic analyses of speech. The seminar will conclude with discussions and recommendations for research and pedagogy at the intersection of prosody and pragmatics. The final deliverable associated with this seminar will be to perform independent prosodic analyses of pragmatic speech acts with meaningful interpretations of the quantitative findings.
