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8 - Analysing expressives in a spoken corpus of Majorcan Catalan

from Romance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2023

By
Nicolau Dols
Edited by
Jeffrey P. Williams
Jeffrey P. Williams
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
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Summary

The chapter analyses a small corpus of twelve Catalan folk tales voice-dramatised and radio broadcast in Majorca in 1959. Most of the lexical material studied here is elicited from the same source and from Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, a master work of 20th-century romance lexicography. The expressive resources used in the recordings can be analysed as actual resources in the language for they are shared by both speakers and listeners and they successfully convey a part of the meaning. Along with voice-attached resources as pitch, intensity, or speech rate, other more conventional means such as those preserved in writing (morphological, lexical, syntactic) are also analysed. The findings by Dingemanse and Akita (2017) on the (inverse) relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration are used. The chapter demonstrates the degree to which expressives can be marked by means of phonetic cues in Catalan, initially setting the border between ideophones and unconventional spoken iconicity. By comparing oral and written versions of the same tales it is proposed that fixability by writing is a good test of grammatical integration, at least a necessary condition.

Keywords

expressivityiconicityideophonesMajorcan Catalan
Type
Chapter
Information
Expressivity in European Languages , pp. 269 - 292
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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