Shakespearean focus
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A good phonetics-class exercise:
Explain how the details of performance — the duration of speech segments, the duration and location of silences, the distribution of amplitude, voice quality, and pitch contours, and the alignment of gesture and posture with the speech — interact to convey messages beyond the mere word sequence.
And also, how much of all that variation has to do with the interaction among the performers as opposed to the presentation of Hamlet's question?
JPL said,
April 5, 2025 @ 5:26 pm
Among probably many others. What kinds of distinctions are put in focus by the "marked" suprasegmentals, as opposed to the "unmarked" version? Distinctions involving negation seem to be indicated by increased perceptual salience of the form indicating the object of the binary shift ("this, not that"); distinctions involving alternate choice or options seem to be indicated by rising (anticipatory) intonation. Given the probable intended message, another alternative would be something like, "To be … or … not to be, to not be … that is the question." with the appropriate intonation. How would some of these distinctions be expressed in a tone language? "Without [the notion of] contrast, linguistics is dead!", and so would normal discourse be. (Much is missed in the reading of written texts when these contrasts are not indicated (by the authors), where in speech they would be.) One group that does pay attention to this problem is comedians.
Peter Cyrus said,
April 6, 2025 @ 3:23 am
MY question is, how are these variants notated? :) I've been marking the tonic with an intonation (one of six or eight) and the end of the tone group as rising or falling. I also mark pre-tonic heads. Is that enough?
David Z. said,
April 6, 2025 @ 1:26 pm
This reminds one (i.e., me) of the scene in WC Fields's film The Oldfashioned Way, about a troupe of actors, where benefactor Cleopatra Pepperday is promised a role, reciting the line "Here comes the prince." She practices the line many times, emphasizing different words, although she never actually gets to deliver it on stage.