{"title":"Horse-directed vocalizations: Clicks, trills, and /ho:/","authors":"Beatrice Szczepek Reed","doi":"10.1016/j.langcom.2024.11.006","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The study investigates horse-directed vocalizations in English and German. A corpus of human-horse activities contains clicks, trills, and variants of /ho:/. Horse-directed vocalizations show much phonetic and prosodic variation, which makes them adjustable to local interactional contexts. The largest group are clicks (lateral, dental, bilabial), which are used to ask horses to move faster. Trills (bilabial, alveolar) optionally end in alveolar stops. Their duration, intonation, and overall pitch vary considerably. German and English speakers use trills for opposite interactional purposes (slowing down vs. speeding up). /ho:/-type vocalizations vary with regard to first consonants, vowels, final consonants, duration, and intonation. /ho:/-variants are used to calm and/or slow horses down. Unlike non-lexical vocalizations in human talk, horse-directed vocalizations have specific, conventionalized meanings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":47575,"journal":{"name":"Language & Communication","volume":"100 ","pages":"Pages 25-45"},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language & Communication","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271530924000788","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The study investigates horse-directed vocalizations in English and German. A corpus of human-horse activities contains clicks, trills, and variants of /ho:/. Horse-directed vocalizations show much phonetic and prosodic variation, which makes them adjustable to local interactional contexts. The largest group are clicks (lateral, dental, bilabial), which are used to ask horses to move faster. Trills (bilabial, alveolar) optionally end in alveolar stops. Their duration, intonation, and overall pitch vary considerably. German and English speakers use trills for opposite interactional purposes (slowing down vs. speeding up). /ho:/-type vocalizations vary with regard to first consonants, vowels, final consonants, duration, and intonation. /ho:/-variants are used to calm and/or slow horses down. Unlike non-lexical vocalizations in human talk, horse-directed vocalizations have specific, conventionalized meanings.
期刊介绍:
This journal is unique in that it provides a forum devoted to the interdisciplinary study of language and communication. The investigation of language and its communicational functions is treated as a concern shared in common by those working in applied linguistics, child development, cultural studies, discourse analysis, intellectual history, legal studies, language evolution, linguistic anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, the politics of language, pragmatics, psychology, rhetoric, semiotics, and sociolinguistics. The journal invites contributions which explore the implications of current research for establishing common theoretical frameworks within which findings from different areas of study may be accommodated and interrelated. By focusing attention on the many ways in which language is integrated with other forms of communicational activity and interactional behaviour, it is intended to encourage approaches to the study of language and communication which are not restricted by existing disciplinary boundaries.