Between Recognition and Resignation – The Prosodic Forms and Communicative Functions of the Czech Confirmation Tag “jasně”

Like question tags, confirmation tags such as the Czech affirmative particle jasně can be used with various prosodic characteristics that augment, reverse or otherwise modify their relatively unspecific lexical meaning. We extracted 172 instances of jasně from several dialogues and assessed their discourse function. 36 prosodic correlates in temporal, amplitude and fundamental frequency domains were measured and used in three computational classifiers: linear discriminant analysis, classification trees and artificial neural networks. All three methods significantly reflected the functional assessments and additionally indicated the relative importance of individual predictors in a mutually consistent manner.