‘A huge motorbike fell out of the air’: Juxtaposition of Communicative Dynamism and Prosodic Prominence in Presentation Sentences with Initial Context-Independent Subjects in J. K. Rowling’s "Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone"
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
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| Description | Apart from a suitable methodology and an insightful analysis, an appropriate interpretation of the text material seems to stand at the root of linguistic research of all sorts across schools, approaches, and methods. It follows that within theories of information structure, including Firbas’s functional sentence perspective (FSP), due to its multifaceted character, this postulate holds true perhaps even more so. Among other aspects, it is especially the relatively blurred and at times perhaps indistinct borderline between the two dynamic semantic scales (Presentation Scale and Quality Scale) that has raised many questions in FSP research (Firbas 1975, 1992, 1995; Dušková 1999, 2015, 2020; Svoboda, 2005, 2006; Chamonikolasová 2007, 2010; Adam 2013, 2014, 2016; Rohrauer 2015; Brůhová and Malá 2017; Adam and Headlandová Kalischová 2017). Examining J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (both as an audiobook recording by a native speaker, and the published text), the proposed paper focuses on one of the most common configurations of presentation sentences, namely structures with an initial context-independent subject, such as ‘Fear flooded him’ or ‘A huge motorbike fell out of the air’. Since the prototypical presentation sentences violate the end-focus principle (with the most prominent, context-independent element occupying the initial position), the prosodic treatment of these utterances in spoken discourse becomes an important issue, especially for learners of English at all levels. The research objective of this paper is to scrutinize how native speakers place the intonation centre in such structures, i.e., to map the correspondence between the degrees of communicative dynamism (as identified in the text) and prosodic prominence (as detected in the recordings). |