Functions and mechanisms in linguistic research —Lessons from speech prosody
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2011/04/0001/000170Keywords:
communicative function, mechanism, speech prosodyAbstract
Human speech, as a collection of complex phenomena, can be explored from many different angles, and interesting data can be generated through various approaches. However, if we aim to substantially improve our understanding of speech, it is advantageous to focus on its communicative functions and the mechanisms that enable them. This paper uses prosodic phenomena in speech as examples to illustrate the necessity as well as the potential benefits of such function- and mechanism-oriented approaches.
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