The talk proposes the absolute need to incorporate prosody to the pragmatic analysis of language and defends that the study of context is incomplete without the careful analysis of the acoustic elements that compose the kaleidoscope of speech. In some way, this approach is a return to the origins of discourse analysis in the late 60’s and early 70’s, when revered functional grammarians and discourse analysts like Halliday (1967, 1970) and Brazil (1975), inter alii, demonstrated the inextricable relationship between prosody and language functions.
The way an utterance is pronounced belongs to the realm of prosody, and based on the acoustic performance of language, pragmatics can identify the intentions with which utterances are pronounced and how they may help to clarify the meaning behind some grammatical structures that do not render transparent pragmatic force on the basis of their constructions.
Although nowadays it is possible to obtain a good description of prosody with the aid of computer programmes, pragmaticians have rarely approached the study of meaning from a prosodic perspective. Sometimes it seems as if speech were the subject matter for the study of meaning, as in a script, but without the realisation of that script in a context. The present talk will try to bridge the gap between pragmatics and prosody, identify the main prosodic theories that can be useful for pragmatic research, and will present some of the current research with specific emphasis on the prosody of pragmatic markers in native and non-native speakers of English.
