Prosody-Pragmatics Interface in the Sitcom Discourse

Abstract

The paper presents the outcomes of the analysis of the tonic stress placement and its interpretation in terms of a speaker’s communicative intention in the original version of the episode of the sitcom ‘Friends’. Phonetic and pragmatic analyses of an utterance represent a combination of langue and parole phenomena and that of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The research intention is to explore quasi-spontaneous conversational speech of American variety of English, and to establish in what manner the occurrence of tonic stress is reflected in pragmatic interpretation of the selected audio-visual text. The findings show that the genre of pre-scripted text does not necessarily inhibit and/or determine the mere vocal realization and pragmatic reading.