Multimodal-ish: prosodic and kinesic aspects of bounded and free uses of ish

Abstract

The article explores the prosodic and kinesic aspects of three different ish constructions using corpus data from the multimodal NewsScape Library of International Television News. The results reveal that bound -ish with ‘approximate’ meaning is longer in duration, higher in pitch, and shows more pitch variability than bound -ish with ‘properties’ meaning. Free Ish is also longer in duration and shows more pitch variability but is also prosodically set apart from its linguistic environment. Furthermore, the different ish constructions prove to be associated with different sets of kinesic features, although none of these reaches a significant level in the statistical model. It will be argued that the prosodic aspects mirror the constructional status of ish, whereas the kinesic aspects may be used to support their different functions.