Prosody and Humor
Eduardo Urios-Aparisi and Manuela Wagner Table 1
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| 176 Eduardo Urios-Aparisi and Manuela Wagner
Table 1. Carrie’s and Mr. Big’s interaction, Season 1 Episode 2 Text with pauses Global F0 Duration F0 of “cute” 1 Big: I started reading your column after we met 151.84 2 Carrie: You did? 302.6 3 Big: Yeah (1.17) cute 148.13 0.4 seconds F0 144.99 4 Carrie: Cute 224.95 0.31seconds 5 Big: Well (1.28) Yeah (0.45) cute What are you writing about now? 142.48 0.4 seconds F0: 135.54 6 Carrie: Well, I’m working on a story about men who date models. (0.6) 220.05 7 Any thoughts? 221.63 8 Big: Only that they’re very lucky. So what have you discovered about these men who are dating mod- els? (moves very close to Carrie) 123.95 9 Carrie: Well, I’m discovering that some of them treat it as a competitive sport and others I think just need the validation 234.99 10 Big: and probably others just have a thing for excep- tionally beautiful women 136.32 11 Carrie: Exactly 251.17 12 Big: And there’s something wrong with that? 105.86 13 Carrie: No, there’s nothing wrong. I just think it might become a little monotonous. Puff? (Offering him an hors d’oeuvre) 207.63 14 Big: Um no thanks 15 Big: So where do you uh where do you write these stories? 146.52 16 Carrie: My cute stories? 287.88 0.3 seconds F0 290.38 17 Big: Yeah, have you got an office or anything? 126.26 18 Carrie: No, well about half the time I’m at my apartment and the other half I’m over at this coffee shop on 73rd and Madison 215.16 19 Big: Oh uh Carrie, I’d like you to meet Misha 150.59 20 Carrie: Oh hi, you were great in the show 258.52 Prosody of humor in Sex and the City 177 especially relevant for the prosodic characterization of Mr. Big and his deadpan delivery of ironic remarks. As we can see, it is difficult to separate pitch from other kinds of intonation practices and, in this passage the different uses of the word “cute” illuminates all the elements at play in the creation of additional meanings. The length of the word gives additional pragmatic meaning to the core semantic meaning of the word, while the raising intonation draws attention to the fact that the word has been used previously and further ironic meanings need to be in- ferred in a type of irony which Sperber and Wilson (1981, 1995, 1998) call echoic mention. The following instances of humor are also found in episode 2 (“Models and Mortals”). The four main female characters discuss Miranda’s last date, when she accidentally went out with a “modelizer”, a man who only dates models. The humor of this section is set around puns and ironic remarks, especially those of Samantha and Miranda. In this case, the global pitch of the utterances of the par- ticipants in this interaction falls within a pitch range of 200–250 Hz, but some instances of lower global pitch show how the interactants can signal a turn-change that also becomes an ironic response to the previous utterance. Miranda’s uses the pitch range of 150–200 Hz in examples 3 to 4. tải về 1.21 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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