Page 212 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Say It in Singing! 187

pauses, various noises and nonsense utterances, wide pitch excursions,
supposedly disrupting the linguistic framework, lead on the contrary to
better communication and interaction between speakers (Clark 1999,
Fischer 1999, Jekat 1999), as they provide cues of synchronization
between speakers, and perhaps also facilitate automatic recognition
and understanding (Gallwitz et al. 1999).
Indeed, the choice of words, of phrase ordering and sentence
structures—in other words, the semantic and syntactic means—
contribute in framing out and casting the meaning in the most ap-
propriate way. Still, all the para-linguistic and extra-linguistic stuff is
superimposed to clarify, clearly disambiguate and capture meaning in a
subtle, personal way. This stuff is the matter of shared codes; however,
its use, occurrence and combination in the actual performance stand
for an accurate and personal capture of sense. This capture outlines a
sort of subjective space, whereby the only way to subjectively express
meaning is to prosodically modify, release or set against the well-
framed organization of linguistic units: for instance, using unexpected
prominence with respect to the syntactic status of the word, or opposing
a prosodic grouping (and/or pause) to the syntactic one.
As in other fields, in speech a person settles one’s own identity by
discarding common behaviour to some extent. A space remains free for
each speaker, given the linguistic rules and intonative background, to
disrupt and break down (or conversely to support and even to focus)
the syntactic links between units (Caelen-Haumont 1981; Zellner 1997).
In spontaneous speech, this space is prosodically outlined by the
F0 range within words (in fact |ΔF0| because in this space the
relevant information lies in the difference between F0 maximum/
minimum, not in the direction of the F0 slope), and associated cues
such as F0 maximum, duration and, occasionally, intensity, pause,
downstepping.
Figures 6.2 and 6.3 illustrate sudden rises of pitch associated
with a speaker’s expression of irony. The topic of this fragment of
spontaneous speech is the renaming of a street, formerly ‘rue de
Lyon’, with a complicated foreign name, ‘rue Hiskovitch’. The speaker
says: ‘They simplified [it], now it is called la rue Hiskovitch, with a
“h” in the beginning.’ Dotted lines indicate the intonation that would
be expected by a normative semantic model based on the support/
apport information structure (akin to topic/comment; see Caelen-
Haumont 2001) and occasional syntactic features. A slight rise of