Pétur Knútsson

Ordination and sentence accent: some English and Icelandic differences.

Abstract:

I shall discuss the subordinative tendency in English prose and the coordinative or appositive tendency in Icelandic prose, which is a well-documented syntactic/stylistic problem (for translators or example), and relate it to the little-discussed difference of “deaccenting” in spoken English as against “reaccenting” in spoken Icelandic. My rather speculative thesis will be that both effects are correlative, or at least have common denominators. This approach also entails a claim that the indexical functions of prose syntax, in particular the split between direct/indirect discourse and Bakhtinian dialogic discourse, can also be approached in terms of speakable and unspeakable intonation (or accentuation). I draw on the ideas of Alan Cruttenden (de- and re-accenting) and Charles Lock (unspeakable intonation).

I shall start with a well-known problem of Icelandic writing in English.

Consider the following sentences:

1Margrét byrjar í háskólanum í haust, en hún stefnir á lögfræði.

2Jón var svangur, en hann hafði ekki borðað síðan um morguninn.

1aMargaret starts at university this autumn, but she wants to be a lawyer.

2aJon was hungry, but he hadn’t eaten since the morning.

The two Icelandic sentences 1 and 2 above are fairly normal, but the English ones, 3 and 4, are very strange. They seem to mean:

1b.Margaret starts at university this autumn, in spite of wanting to be a lawyer

2b.John was hungry, even though he had not eaten since morning

If you think about these sentences, you’ll see that they don’t make sense. But the Icelandic sentences are OK. So what's going on?

The simple answer is of course that "en" and "but" don't mean the same things, whatever the dictionary says. We would be on the right track if we said that English "but" always implies an ALTERNATIVE; it joins two elements where the second one LIMITS or NEGATES the first, not simply defines the first. It is ALWAYS equivalent to “but on the other hand”, ”but in contrast”, “conversely”, “even though”.

Icelandic “en” can mean the same as English “but”, i.e. introduce a contrast:

3Margrét vaknaði snemma, en Jón svaf til ellefu

3aMargaret woke early but John slept until eleven

but in the Icelandic sentences 1 and 2 above, the two facts mentioned in each sentence CORRESPOND or SUPPORT each other. In this case, “en” means something closer to “and”.

Now an explanation along these lines is inadequate to say the least, and not even a good heuristic to offer Icelandic students, because it leads to the question “What should I say instead of “but”. While these sentences can be patched up by saying “since”or “because” instead of “but”, the outcome is not fluent English and anyway you’re not translating the sentence correctly, You want something like

1cMargaret starts at university this autumn, with a view to becoming a lawyer

2cJohn was hungry, not having eaten since morning

The underlying problem is thatIceland has a coordinative, appositive tendency, while English prefers the hypotactic, subordinate style. Here are some more examples, this time ones I have not constructed.

Can we hazard good English translations?[1]

•Það er viðvörun í gangi, en búist er við stormi á norðvesturlandi
A warning has been issued of…

•fjórir krossnefir voru í gær á Hvanneyri, er krossnefurinn verpir nú í febrúar
which does in fact nest in February

•Jú jú þar er nóg um að vera þar og við höldum áfram að sýna fullt í beinni útsendingu og tökum þetta síðan saman, en kínverska parið Sju Sén og Hong Bo Sjá sigraði í parakeppni í listhlaupi á skautum ....
but the main news is that…

•eiginleikinn í mér er bara drifinn áfram af forvitni (og kannski pínulitlu hugrekki,) en ég hef alltaf verið voðalega forvitin
(and perhaps braveness, but Ihave always been driven by curiosity)

•hvassast var sem sagt á norðvestanverðu landinu yfirleitt en einna hægast á suðvestanverðu landinu
although

  • Lack of en in translated parts of the news.[2]

There is some tendency to look upon the appostive or coordinative style as being simpler or somehow less sophisticated than complex subordination. I don’t know whether this is a symptom of the Icelandic inferiority complex or whether it is based on some mistaken idea that language is always becoming more sophisticated, more civilised, more complex, but it is certainly mistaken. To begin with, we must remember that the “simpler” appositive style is a powerful force in all literatures, from the Icelandic family sagas to Hemmingway to Þórbergur Þórðarson, and continues to be so. Virgil, whom we are told writes the finest classical Latin poetry, is said to have ushered in a new era of coordination and apotaxis which charmed his reader who were used to the complex subordination of the novi poets before him.[3]So I think we have to rule out the idea that the Icelandic appositive style is somehow more poorly developed, less mature than English subordination.

There is perhaps some evidence that the movement from spoken to written language is a movement from apotaxis to hypotaxis, at least in the Germanic languages, but there is a lot of counter-evidence. The dróttskáld with their convoluted poetry were oral poets, and although they were perhaps not particularly hypotactic they required their listeners to decipher some very complex syntax. Nevertheless it is true that earlier Germanic prose, and our best examples are from Old English,was appositive and coordinative in much the same way as modern Icelandic. Some examples may be informative:

And hy þa ymb þa geatu feohtende wæron oð hi þærinne fulgon and þone æþeling ofslogon and þa men þe mid him wæron ealle butan anum, se wæs þæs ealdormannes godsunu,

and he his feorh generede, and he wæs oft gewundod.

*He saved his life and he was wounded many times.

He saved his life although he was wounded many times.

Hann bjargaði lífi sínu en hann var margsærður[4]

Þa com se eawfæsta. to ðam eadigan cuðberhte. and he wæs on ðam timan. to prafoste geset. on ðam munuclife. þe is lindisfarnea gehaten.

Then this married man came to Cuthbert the Blessed, and he was at that time established as provost of the monasteryknown asLindisfarne

Þá kom sá sá kvænti til Kynbjarts hins sæla, en hann var í þá tíð settur prófastur í þeim munkaklaustri sem heitir Lindisfarne[5]

here it is worth noting that Old English could use and in the same coordinate way that Icelandic uses what is etymologically the “same” word en. The Old English word for ‘but’ is ac, cognate with og, and as far as I can see it is only used in Old English with the contrastive meaning that but has in modern English. Only and can be used like Icelandic en.

To summarize the first part of this paper: There is a general tendency to use apotaxis and coordination in written and spoken Icelandic and a no less general tendency to use hypotaxis and subordination in English.

Or to be hypotactic:

While there is a general tendency to use apotaxis in Icelandic, English favours hypotaxis.

And this leads me to the second topic in this paper. I hope I can make the connection,

Like everybody, be see our written protocol as being normal.

But of course al writing systems are to some degree underspecified:

Classical Hebrew and Arabic texts do not specify the vowels

Classical Latin and Greek texts do no show spaces between words

Classical Sanskrit does show sandhi effects which we ignore (important – input)

Icelandic shows allophonic variation more than it needs to (overspecification)

None of these encode prosodic information apart form sporadic and inconsistent use of emphasis or CAPITAL LETTERS.

It should be clear that syntax is signalled in the spoken language by more than the sequence of words, and various elements of what syntacticians view as lacking overt representation – various traces of movement, a good deal of indexical marking – is actually overtly present in the prosodic tier. (And this is where I was hoping to go in the second part of my talk which will have to await better times.) In this discussion I follow the so-called EnglishSchool of phonetics as practised by Alan Cruttenden, Peter Roach and John Wells. Let me give you a brief outline of one aspect of this approach.

A stretch of spoken discourseis said to consist of IPs[6], each of which corresponds roughly to the syntactic idea of the sentence or clause. Each IPin English and Icelandic consists of a succession of stressed syllables, interspersed by groups of zero or more unstressed syllables. Here is a typical example of an IP:

x x / x x x x / x x x / /

Now the program has been delayed by about six months

In each IP ONE of the stressed syllables, the Nucleus, is dominant. What this dominance consists of is a little problematic, and in practicet what we feel intuitively to be the nucleus is not always the most salient physically syllable of the IP. The syllable selected as nucleus serves to identify those pieces of information which correlate to features in earlier or laterphrases and thus inform the whole structure of the discourse: that is to say that nucleus identification is an important factor in mapping out the indexical structure of the discourse.

What I shallfocus here is that there seems at least in English to be a default position of the nucleus, used to signal what Cruttenden calls Broad Focus, where no particular single element of the IP is foregrounded, i.e. where there are no indexical connections which need to be signalled. Typically in English and I think too in Icelandic this is the rightmost stress:

Now the 'program has been de'layed by about 'six*MONTHS

Now we can experiment by moving the nucleus around and seeing what effect this has on the discourse structure:

Now the *program has been delayed by about six months

Now the program has been delayed by about *six months

Now the program has been delayed by a*bout six months

Now the program *has been delayed by about six months

Now lets look at a larger chunk of this piece of discourse:

Now the program has been delayed by about six *months ‌|

so there was a feeling that we needed to add six months at the *end of the program |

to compensate *for these delays |

Now the program has been delayed by about six *months ‌|

so there was a feeling that we needed to add six months at the *end of the program |

to compensate *for these delays |

Here we can see the effect of what is known as deaccenting: repeated information in IPs following the first one is identified by moving the nucleus leftwards (advancing the nucleus) away from the default position of the final stress. THIS MOVEMENT IS MANDATORY in most varieties of English

Now we come to one of the differences between Icelandic and English. Å survey made by Cruttenden in the 1990s showed that deaccenting was mandatory in English and some other languages, optional in others, and rare or non-existent in yet others. Icelandic was not one of the languages he surveyed, but my observations indicate that although deaccenting can be found in Icelandic speech it is relatively rare: the default nucleus position does not depend on deaccenting. However I think I can show that Icelandic usesother tonal markers, other than nucleus movement, to indicate indexicality. Here are some examples:

gera ráð fyrir því að það verð að mestu leyti þurrt og jafnvel skýjað með köflum á norðaustanverðu *landinu | og hiti verði þetta átta til níu stig sunnan lands en nokkrum gráðum hærri hiti á norðanverðu *landinu.

Nei ég er það er ekkert rétt að við séum kom(in) með neinni niðurstöðu um það hvernig við ætlum að bregðast við | en við erum að vinna að því að halda áfram samstöðu allra flokka um það hvernig eigi að bregðast við ...

íbúafjöldinn um 0,06% af íbúum sambandsins, og þjóðaframleiðslan 0,08% af framleiðslu Evrópusambandsins

hún verður hægri stjórn mynduð af flokkum kristilegra demókrata og frjálsra démokrata

það er nú reyndar sú þróun að eiga sér stað núna að áfallastreituröskun eða PTSD eins og það er líka kallað | sem er viðurkenndur sjúkdómur af alþjóða heilbrigðisstofnuninni |

að það er smátt og smátt að verða áþreifanlegri mælingar á þeim sjúkdómi|

og nú er íslenskt nýsköpunarfyrirtæki sem hlaut verðlaun í fyrra einmitt að gera rannsóknir á heilavirkni fólks sem að glímir við þennan sjúkdóm[7].

Conclusion

So here we have 2 distinctive differences between English and Icelandic:

  • Icelandic prefers apotaxis – English prefers hypotaxis
  • Deaccenting is mandatory in British and American English, but only used infrequently in Icelandic.

Is there a connection between these two features?

My expectation when I started to write this paper was that I could shown a connection. Well I have not found it yet, and although I have found several points which might support my hypothesis I have also found points which indicate the contrary.

It is clear that prosodic patterns are integral to clausal relationships.

We might expect that the subordination tendency, which in some ways breaks up the linear sequence of logical propositions, would demand very clear intonation patterns. These would include clear nucleus signalling, and since the effect of deaccenting is to de-emphasize old or given information we might expect it to feature strongly in highly subordinated discourse.

On the other hand, it could be argued, a language which does not use much subordination might not find the need for extensive nucleus movement in order to acknowledge shared or given information. I tried translating this statement by the IMF spokesman in Iceland into Icelandic:

Now the program has been delayed by about six months so there was a feeling that we needed to add six months at the end of the program to compensate for these delays

Ferlinu seinkaði um sex mánuði, en við frestuðum ferlinu um sex mánuði til að vega upp á móti þessari seinkun.

(DOUBLETALK!!).[8]

But you might just as well say that incoordinate discourse such as in Icelandic the discourse conditions are precisely NOT signalled by syntactical means, and so one might expect greater reliance on intonation and nucleus movement to bring out the discourse structure.

What we most need now is detailed indexical and prosodic analyses of large bodies of spoken discourse to identify the areas of correspondence, if there are any, between indexicality and prosody; and then hopefully between different coordinate and subordinate indexicalities. Good BA essay material?

2303 words.

[1]Það er viðvörun í gangi, en búist er við stormi á norðvesturlandi (mánud 15 feb 2010 Rás 1 veðurfréttir kl 18:45)

eiginleikinn í mér er bara drifinn áfram af forvitni og kannski pínulitlu hugrekki, en ég hef alltaf verið voðalega forvitin ATN USE LAST AKSO- has both deacc and en

fjórir krossnefir voru í gær á Hvanneyri, er krossnefurinn verpir nú í febrúar

að ímynda sér að þú sér sérfræðingur í - hvað draugum, eða – Ég veit nú ekki hvað það er, en ég hef gert kannanir til dæmis um reyslu manna af látnum ..

Jú jú þar er nóg um að vera þar og við höldum áfram að sýna fullt í beinni útsendingu og tökum þetta síðan saman, en kínverska parið Sju Sén og Hong Bo Sjá sigraði í parakeppni í listhlaupi á skautum ....

Fyrir það fyrsta gékk í desember annar dómur í héraðsdómi sem virðist ganga þvert gegn hinum nýja, en mnálið fer fyrir hæstarétt

hvassast var sem sagt á norðvestanverðu landinu yfirleitt en einna hægast á norð suðvestanverðu landinu

dregur yfirleitt úr vind en þó áfram strekkingur hér með austurströndinni

[2]So we will find that where both written and spoken Icelandic has two coordinate sentences, often joined by en, a natural English translation will contain by a main clause and a subordinate clause, or simply a main clause with a non-finite clause or non-verbal phrase of some sort.

[3] “Not long elaborate periods with the subordinate parts carefully dovetailed into the central thought, not hypotaxis, but paratxis, with suppression of logical connecting particles.” Palmer p115 on Virgil. Parataxis is coordination without coordinators.

[4] (Quirk and Wrenn 96 (para. 149): Parker Chronicle 755, British Library, MS. Cotton Tiberius B.IV seg42

[5] (Ælfric, Second Series of Homilies [Catholic Homilies]: Cuthbert, seg07:85.140)

[6] units variously known as Intonation Phrases (IPs), Tone Units, Intonation Units

[7] Kastljós 17.2.2010. Þórdís Elva Þórgrímsdóttir, Sveinn Andri Sveinsson

[8]This intonation breaks the mandatory deaccenting rule in English , and can only occur because the discourse structure is corrupt: then sentence does not make sense. Very clever camouflage by this representative of the IMF in Iceland**(beginning of the) program, (end of the) program for six months.