Communicative dynamism and prosodic prominence of pronouns in English and Czech
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | Pronouns usually convey context-dependent information; they denote discourse items that are easily accessible to the communication participants' minds, i.e. items previously (or subsequently) introduced into the verbal context or items that are present in the situational context. Such elements display low degrees of both communicative dynamism and prosodic prominence. Under certain conditions, however, pronouns become carriers of the most prominent stress and the highest degree of communicative dynamism within a sentence. A previous study (Chamonikolasová 2007) suggested that in English, the occurrence of heavily stressed pronouns is more frequent than in Czech. The present paper investigates the conditions of nuclear accentuation of pronouns and outlines some potential causes of the difference between English and Czech pronouns. It develops some of the observations made in previous mono-lingual studies of English pronouns (Chamonikolasová 1989 and 1991). |
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