The assignment of nuclear accents in three different discourse genres : documentaries, TED Talks and interviews

Abstract

This dissertation investigates nuclear accent placement across three spoken discourse genres in Standard Southern British English (documentaries, TED Talks, and interviews) with the aim of determining how canonical descriptions of tonicity operate in authentic communicative contexts. Drawing on a corpus of 5,494 intonation phrases (IPs) and grounded in the British tradition of intonation, the study examines (a) the extent to which the main trends in nucleus placement discussed in the literature appear in the corpus, (b) how these three discourse genres differ in tonicity, and (c) in what ways the deviations from the Last Lexical Item (LLI) Rule observed in the corpus are associated with genre-specific discourse practices. The findings reveal a strong overall dominance of the LLI Rule, yet they also demonstrate that departures occur in highly systematic ways conditioned by genre.