Exploring the prosody of stance: Variation in the realization of stance adverbials

Over the last three decades, several studies have applied corpus-analytical techniques to investigate the ways in which ‘stance’ is expressed in spoken and written discourse. Corpus research has shown that there are strong differences among registers in their reliance on the different types of stance expressions. In general, spoken registers express stance to a much greater extent than written registers. Based on analysis of the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English, the present paper explores some of the ways in which prosody interacts with lexico-grammatical structure in the expression of stance. The analysis will focus on the extent to which stance adverbials are marked with prosodic prominence (shown by pitch, length, and amplitude). These findings will be interpreted relative to two overall goals: 1. to investigate the ways in which prosodic patterns vary across specific stance adverbials, and 2. to explore the impact of register, speaker group, frequency of occurrence, and syntactic patterns on the prosodic prominence of stance adverbials.