8 - On rhythm in everyday German conversation: beat clashes in assessment utterances

Summary

Introduction

This chapter deals with a rhythmical phenomenon that has been described as beat clash in metrical phonology. Beat clashes are highly marked rhythmical structures in which the phonologically unmarked alternation between prominent and non-prominent syllables is cancelled in favour of a succession of prominent syllables. It will be shown that participants in natural German conversation not only let beat clashes happen, but that beat clashes are actively constructed by turning non-prominent syllables into prominent ones. These achieved beat clashes regularly occur within assessment utterances, but seem to be restrained by sequential constraints: beat clashes occur in extended first assessments like stories, news or informings and in seconds to these conversational objects, but they are absent in first and second assessments of assessment pairs. This absence is claimed to be not accidental but systematic and it is accounted for by regarding the operative preference structure of assessments.

I will thus start the chapter by discussing the organization of assessment pairs and stress some differences between German and English data. In section 3 a phonological account of beat clashes will be presented. Section 4 deals with the analysis of beat clashes in assessment utterances and section 5 with the absence of beat clashes in assessment pairs.

Assessments

Assessments represent a good choice as an object of research since collecting instances in everyday conversation quickly leads to a large corpus. Whatever the subject of the conversation seems to be, the participants routinely make assessments. Talking about a person, an event or an experience and assessing that person, that event and that experience seem to be tightly linked and sometimes even inseparably intertwined.