• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1361

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

“Where you at? Where you going?”: Prosodic Rhythm in the Verbal Strategy ‘Marking’

Authors: Nielsen, Rasmus
Submitted by: Nielsen, Rasmus (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark)

The current study investigates the linguistic construction of the verbal strategy ‘marking’ in African American English (AAE) – i.e. the use of constructed dialogue, or direct quotes, to laminate narrative characters with certain attitudes and belief systems (Mitchel-Kernan 1972). Previous studies of marking (e.g., Mitchel-Kernan 1972) and quotations in embedded evaluations in AAE (e.g., Labov 1972) offer insights into the interactional aspects of marking, without offering any variation analyses of how AAE prosody contributes to the linguistic construction of this verbal genre. Specifically, the saliency of prosodic rhythm in marking remains underexamined, but promises to be a rich site for the further exploration of how speakers of African American English use stylistic resources to shape meanings and identities.

In the present study, I address the above shortcomings by correlating measures of prosodic rhythm, using the Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) to identify stress-timed and syllable-timed speech (Low and Grabe 1995), with specific instances of marking in the interview discourse. For a more detailed analysis of marking in narratives, I use DuBois’ (2007) discourse approach of scalar alignment to identify convergent, divergent, and ambiguous cases of alignment, thus combining discourse and variationist approaches.

The data comes from a one-hour sociological interview with ‘Michael’, a fourteen-year-old African American from Washington, D.C. ‘Michael’ is a vivid storyteller, and the interview centers on topics of concern for inner city minority teens, including teenage pregnancy, violence, police confrontations, and death (cf. Froyum Roise 2004, Schilling-Estes 2007). A total of 216 PVI calculations were made in 34 narratives, which included the constructed dialogue and the narrative discourse immediately preceding and following the constructed speech.

The analysis reveals that Michael’s rhythm when marking a character in the discourse is significantly (p=.007) more stressed-timed (.638) compared to the surrounding narrative discourse (.413). However, a fine-grained analysis demonstrates that prosodic rhythm is used to construct marking in different ways: there is a significant stylistic shift between stressed-timed and syllable-timed speech in divergent alignment compared to convergent and ambiguous alignment. For example, in certain cases of divergent alignment, Michael constructs the speech of a police officer and uses rhythm to not only report what was said, but simultaneously laminate the performed quote with certain authoritative ideologies, “Like if you walking in a neighborhood where you don’t live at, they come up to you, ‘Where you at? Where you going?’It don’t matter where we going!”

I conclude the analysis by showing that highly stress-timed speech in constructed dialogue enables the occurrence of shifting stress patterns and amplifies patterns of continuing shifts between high and low pitches (Loman 1967, 1975; Tarone 1973). The analysis reveals that a shift in rhythm for Michael is a stance taking strategy that occurs in oppositional alignment with authoritative figures, and the marking that emerges from a skillful manipulation of prosodic timing, or rhythm, creates an ideological link between Michael and the sociocultural challenges he faces in the urban landscape.