Breathy Voice and the Oxytonic or the Paroxytonic Rhythm in the Reproduction of Thought Creations in German-Language Conversations

Abstract

This research is based on the assumption that the breathy voice within a set of linguistic-prosodic features, in addition to the reproduction of already realized utterances, marking utterances that the speaker assumes participants of possible future events could utter and marking added fictive utterances in German-language conversations is also used for reproduction of other thought creations. The corpus of this research consists of clips from conversations conducted within German phone-in radio shows, with each of them containing a single use of breathy voice. The analysis shows that the breathy voice is realized in one part of the reported speech and then remains without breathiness, leaving the modal voice. In the analysis, reported speech partly represented the verbalization of assumed utterances or concrete utterances realized multiple times in the past. Thought creations whose reconstructions were verbalized included, in addition to utterances, previous thoughts or assumed thoughts of others.

Keywords

• breathy voice
• conversations in german
• administrative speech
• a linguistic-prosodic set of characteristics