Prosody, Discourse Deixis and Anaphora [email protected]

This paper examines the indexical function of prosody in the signalling of discourse deixis and anaphora (in particular, contrastive accent versus low pitch and weak stress on certain types of context-bound referring expressions: demonstrative-based as well as 3rd person pronouns – mainly in English). The choice of contrastive versus weak stress on given expression types of this character will be shown to have important effects in terms of the creation of discourse from text and context. These effects vary as a function of the degree of deicticity of the type of indexical expression which is contrastively accented (or not accented, as the case may be): contrastively accented demonstratives may serve to create a discourse referent out of the presupposition of a context utterance (a semantic-pragmatic unit which is normally inaccessible to anaphoric retrieval), while contrastively stressed 3rd person pronouns may make salient an entity which is at the periphery of consciousness (thus accessible but not activated, in Chafe’s, 1994 terminology) at the point of reference. In all cases, an element of semantic contrast is implied, which is a feature of demonstrative expressions generally. As has often been pointed out, high pitch as well as strong stress is semiotically equivalent to a gesture, whose indexical function is clear. The paper characterizes contrastive accents placed on indexical expressions in terms of their “discourse operator” function, that of operating on the discourse context in specific ways in order to make salient a referent which is not so at the point of targeting.