Prosodic Correlates of Discourse Structure and Emotion in Discourse Markers that Preface Announcements of News

Abstract

Discourse markers serve important structuring functions such as concluding a contribution or resuming a topic. We address whether, along with their role in structuring discourse, discourse markers carry prosodic cues to the emotional valence of upcoming news, perhaps to prepare the listener’s emotional reaction. Specifically, we explored the realization of French voilà donc (yeah so) when occurring between an announcement of news and its preface: Je vous appelle au sujet de votre chat qui était malade [preface], voilà donc [discourse marker] il est désormais guéri [announcement] (“I’m calling about your sick cat, yeah so he’s now cured”). We recorded 15 speakers reading voicemail messages announcing negative, positive or neutral (e.g., factual) news. We found that the intonation patterns produced with voilà donc correspond to its discursive functions, in line with existing findings, though the choice of pattern did not depend on the emotional valence of the news. Valence was, however, associated with phonetic variation, in that high f0 targets were higher for positive and neutral valence and pitch range was larger for positive valence. This finding suggests that phonetic variation projects the emotional valence of upcoming news even though discourse function primarily determines the choice of intonation pattern.