![]() ![]() ![]() However, the paper restricts this function to expressive interjections, prosodic inputs like pitch, contrastive stress and pace or tempo, and gestural inputs such as language-like gestures, pantomimes and emblems. This paper argues that paralanguage may fulfil a similar enacting function and finetune the conceptual representations arising from content words on the grounds of idiosyncratic, context-dependent features or shades, as well as propositional and non-propositional information about the speaker's psychological states. These include evaluative morphemes, lexical and phrasal items adjacent to content words, and stylistic resources like repetition or rewording. Recent research suggests that this lexical pragmatic process may be marked and steered by various linguistic elements. An alternative explanation to the acoustic-phonetic characteristics of kyoo / kyoo lies in social representations of Cajun English in a historically bilingual and multi-dialectal community, where perceived oddness of a non-standard linguistic expression can be easily attributed to the influence of another language.Īd hoc-concept construction is regarded as a case of free pragmatic enrichment, so it is presented as a non-linguistically mandated process that is automatically accomplished during mutual parallel adjustment. These results suggest the perception of anomalous sounds in this interjection may not be attributed to acoustic characteristics indicative of French influence. Acoustic analyses showed that the interjection-initial /k/ was not unaspirated, its vowel was not nasalized, and it had spectral quality similar to /ɔ/ in mainstream English words. A hypothesis examined next was that this perception could stem from acoustic characteristics of the interjection consistent with linguistic identity markers in Cajun speakers, attributable to Cajun French influence or to the Cajun English vernacular. Anecdotally, Cajuns and non-Cajuns alike comment that it sounds “weird,” as if the word is “not English.” A survey confirmed that the interjection was perceived as atypical sounding when compared to mainstream English words, even more so for the palatalized pronunciation variant (kyoo) than the non-palatalized variant (kyoo). The interjection kyoo/ kaw is used in the English and French of Cajun heritage speakers in Louisiana to express surprise and has not been previously documented. ![]()
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