Special Sessions

Measuring, modeling, and training of speaking styles

Organizers:

Ïo Valls-Ratés (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Oliver Niebuhr (University of Southern Denmark)

Pilar Prieto (ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Prosodic research is increasingly determined by the question of how people talk to one another – or to machines – in certain everyday situations. Addressing this question means looking beyond the basic prosodic phonology of a language. Or, in other words, each language has more than one specific prosody. A speaker’s prosodic setting varies, e.g., depending on the location, medium, situation, interlocutor, etc. We call these settings speaking styles. Speaking styles do not exist for their own sake. Rather, they serve a communicative purpose. In this respect, they form a separate domain of supraphrasal form-function relationships. Our special session is dedicated to these relatively poorly understood relationships, between which speakers of a language often seem to switch unconsciously and yet often consistently and playfully. Therefore we want to bring together researchers and pool papers dealing with speaking styles and, on this basis, take an overarching look at forms, functions, and methods. This new, rich perspective should then support and fuel research on speaking styles in the future.