Again, however
Looking through the Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE2), I saw that one of its sources is Chapter 10 of Volume 2 of Jane Austen's Emma. I've been using seven or eight different audiobook versions of that novel as a source of examples and exercises in ling521 over the past few years, so I thought I'd take a look at the relationship between syntactic structure and performance prosody in that chapter.
Listening to the second sentence raises some interesting questions:
Busy as he was, however, the young man was yet able to shew a most happy countenance on seeing Emma again. [source]
Details aside, it seems clear that in this sentence
- "however" is a kind of prosodic tag;
- "however" is prosodically bound to the phrase that precedes it.
Thereby, however, hangs a tale or two.
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