27 Jul 2004

Erich Round (Yale University)

Last year, in a study of the polysemy and prosody 'some' in spontaneous English and Swedish, I employed a rather minimally complex transcription system for what might be termed 'auditory utterance rhythm'. Somewhat surprisingly, this system produced some very strong results in terms of form-meaning correspondences and enabled me to describe a few characteristics of (Australian) English and (Gothenburg) Swedish which might be challenging within other frameworks. In this talk, therefore, I present the system used and mention the research on which it was based, as well as the main results it led to. Within this, I draw comparisons between 'auditory utterance rhythm' and other ways of investigating speech rhythm, with a view towards reflecting critically on whether one would wish make further studies in the same vein as I did, and what refinements and changes one would want to make to the system used.

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