Re: Prosody-only utterance

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 01/09/05 

Date: Sun, 09 Jan 2005 23:50:29 GMT

Douglas G. Kilday wrote:

> I use the nasalized forms often, and regard them as [?m?m] 'no' and [?mhm]
> 'yes'. Since I regard them as part of English speech, I consider the pair
> to prove that English has a phonemic glottal stop, as /?/ and /h/ provide a
> minimal-pair contrast. Variations in pitch and stress convey emotional
> information which may be equivalent to spoken information.

Elementary linguistics textbooks routinely discuss those forms (and
Miguel's click, "tsk" (UK: "tut")) as examples of paralinguistic
utterances. They are not part of the English language. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net