Discursive, Prosodic and Gestural Analysis of Focalisation Pauses in British English

Gaëlle Ferré (1)

1 LPL - Laboratoire Parole et Langage

In this paper, our intention is to analyse the marking of focalisation pauses in a videotaped corpus of British conversation. Our analysis will be three-dimensional : we will first describe the acoustic characteristics of the pauses and of the tone-units they separate, in order to show the differences between these pauses and other pauses such as demarcative or hesitation pauses. This analysis will include the following parameters : length of pause and rate of speech of the distinct tone-units, F0 movements and intensity before and after the pause. We will then try to see what kind of gestuality is implied in the case of focalisation and will propose a discursive analysis of the context in which the pauses appear.

Mots clés: Pauses; prosody; gestures; discourse analysis

Domaines: Linguistique; Linguistique

Gaëlle Ferré. Discursive, Prosodic and Gestural Analysis of Focalisation Pauses in British English. Interfaces Prosodiques, Mar 2003, Nantes, France. pp.265-270. ⟨hal-00173736⟩