Phonetic reduction and pragmatic organisation in Dutch conversation A usage-based account

This thesis explores the relationship between phonetic reduction and the pragmatic organisation of conversation, and the treatment of this relationship in phonological representation. It reports on an empirical investigation of pragmatic constraints on reduction patterns in a corpus of spontaneous Dutch conversation, combining phonetic analysis and Conversation Analysis. The starting point of the investigation is a study of the discourse marker eigenlijk. The thesis shows that in two pragmatic contexts in which eigenlijk is routinely used, the range of phonetic variants associated with the item is considerably narrower than across the board: in the first context — that of postpositioned self-initiated self-repair — highly reduced forms are the norm, while in the second — that of dispreferred turns in adjacency pairs — observed forms are close to canonical. Further studies of these pragmatic contexts suggest that linguistic structures used in the context of self-repair are recurrently associated with a high degree of temporal and articulatory reduction, while structures in dispreferred turns are recurrently associated with a low degree of reduction. The thesis develops an account of the empirical findings in the framework of Usage-based Phonology, a recent development in the Cognitive Linguistics paradigm. It draws out the implications of two fundamental features of the framework — its rejection of a competence– performance distinction and its adoption of an exemplar-based approach to lexical representation — for the treatment of phonetic reduction, and variation more generally, and its communicative constraints. It outlines an account in which variation is an integral part of phonological representations, and pragmatic and social constraints on speech production are represented as lexical categories. It discusses the status of effort minimisation in usage-based phonological representation, and shows how the proposed account can be accommodated in a constructionist conception of linguistic knowledge.