This folder contains data from Na Hu's PhD project, "The Role of Prosody in Communicating Subjectivity in Causality," supervised by Ted Sanders, Hugo Quené, and Aoju Chen.
The project investigated how language users differentiate between objective causality, which refers to causal relationships that can be directly observed in the physical world, and subjective causality, which is constructed in the mental world. Previous research has shown that specialized causal connectives can help people determine the type of causality the speaker intends to express. However, this dissertation focuses on the role of prosody, which refers to variations in pitch, loudness, and timing, in communicating these two different types of causality.
The dissertation explores how prosody is used to express subjective and objective causality through a dialogue task. The results indicate that there is a trade-off between the use of prosody and specialized causal connectives in expressing these two types of causality. Additionally, the study examines the effect of prosodic information on the construction of subjective and objective causality. Results from a discourse completion task reveal that the prosodic features of the English connective "so" affect listeners' expectations of causal relations in upcoming discourse.
These findings provide new insights into how spoken discourse communicates different types of causality by demonstrating that prosodic information plays a crucial role.
The research was financially supported by the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (Now Institute for Language Sciences) and a scholarship granted to N.H. by the China Scholarship Council (Grant No. 201709110154).
