Discourse intonation of negation in English and Bulgarian : a contrastive analysis

Abstract

This work deals with intonation of negation in English and Bulgarian on the level of discourse. It gives an overview of the different approaches to intonation in the British, the American, and the Bulgarian linguistic tradition. The method that is employed in the analysis of the data of the two languages makes use of both the discourse analysis procedures as developed in the British tradition and the FSP method of the Prague school. The conclusions arrived at in the analysis of the data establish that the discourse intonation of negation patterns in the two languages exemplify a high degree of similarity It is tentatively proposed that the dissimilarities are due to the pitch-range of the rises and the falls, or to the different configuration of the contour on the pretonic