What indexical shift sounds like: Uyghur intonation and interpreting speech reports
Travis Major, Connor Mayer
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004591
May 2019
Recent years have given rise to a considerable amount of research on exceptional behaviors of indexicals (e.g., I, you, here, there, etc.) in embedded contexts, a phenomenon referred to as indexical shift. This paper provides a novel field methodology for diagnosing indexical shift, by eliciting target sentences in controlled discourse contexts and analyzing the prosody of the elicited utterances. This is less cumbersome for consultants than standard semantic diagnostics, and allows for more detailed empirical description. We demonstrate this by investigating indexical shift in Uyghur. In addition to providing a more complete empirical picture, we suggest a modification to the analysis of Uyghur indexical shift proposed by Shklovsky and Sudo (2014). Applying these methods to other languages with indexical shift has the potential to further improve both our empirical and theoretical understanding of the phenomenon.