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14 - Insubordination at the Interaction of Discourse, Grammar, and Prosody

from Part IV - Multimodality and Construction Grammar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2025

By
Pedro Gras
Edited by
Mirjam Fried  and
Kiki Nikiforidou
Mirjam Fried
Affiliation:
Univerzita Karlova
Kiki Nikiforidou
Affiliation:
University of Athens, Greece
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Summary

This chapter explores the interaction between discourse structure, grammar, and prosody, on the example of insubordination, that is, the main clause use of formally subordinate clauses. After an overview of the forms and meanings of insubordinate constructions cross-linguistically, it focuses on a particular illustration of this phenomenon: contrastive insubordinate conditionals (CICC) in Spanish. First, it argues for the constructional status of the pattern and then it explores its discursive and prosodic features. The results of a corpus study show that CICC can occur in five different contexts, with a high preference for dispreferred responses. This is taken as evidence for proposing a network representation, with a schema representing the common form and meaning features of the construction and several instantiations in prototypical and peripheral contexts. Prosodically, the construction is combined with restricted prosodic patterns expressing similar pragmatic functions (focus and contrast). We can thus model prosodic patterns as pairings of a prosodic form and a pragmatic meaning and are inherited by sentence-level constructions expressing compatible pragmatic meanings.

Keywords

insubordinationconditionalsconstructional schemainstantiationdiscoursediscourse positiondiscourseunitprosodyprosodic patternintonation

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The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar , pp. 354 - 383
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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