The Prosody-Discourse Interface IDP

The University of Salford - 12 Sept – 14 Sept inclusive

Including:

•     Research training session on prosody (12 Sept 2pm – 5pm)
•     Workshop on expressives and affective prosody (13 Sept pm)

Aims of conference

This conference is the 4th in a series which provides a forum for those working on the relation between prosody and discourse. As previous conferences have shown, there is a wide range of phenomena which illustrate how research in prosody feeds into research into discourse and vice versa – the communication of attitudes and emotions, implicit communication, information structure, irony, humour in discourse,  the interpretation of parentheticals, the interpretation of anaphora, language processing, and the identification of genre. The relationship between prosody and discourse has been viewed from the perspective of phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, language acquisition, language processing, language pathology, stylistics, language evolution and speech synthesis. Moreover, research has been carried out in a variety of theoretical paradigms. We now aim to build on this research and in this way develop a greater understanding of phenomena at the prosody-discourse interface.

Guest speakers

Conference speakers:

• Nicole Dehe, Konstanz: ‘The disambiguating function of prosody in discourse’
• John Local, York: ‘ Using interactional structure to reconfigure the prosody-pragmatics interface’
  

Speakers at the workshop on expressives and affective prosody will include:

• Christopher Potts, Stanford: ‘ The emergent expressivity of functional morphemes’
• Marc Schroeder, Saarbrucken: ‘Expressive prosody in speech and non-verbal vocalizations’
• Diane Blakemore, Salford: ‘The descriptive ineffability of expressive meaning’

Research Training Workshop on Prosody

This workshop, which will take place from 2 – 5 on 12 September, is open to all PGRS and researchers who would like to improve their understanding of the role played by prosody in discourse and the way in which prosodic features of discourse are represented. The workshop will be led by Elisabeth Delais-Roussarie (Paris) and Brechtje Post (Cambridge).