Non-Lexical Words and Prominence: The Role of Speaker Background and Register

It is commonly argued that lexical words receive prosodic prominence, whereas Non-Lexical Words (NLWs) are non-prominent in spoken discourse. Yet, emergent evidence from spoken corpora preliminarily suggested that this distinction might not be completely accurate as NLWs can be situationally informative and, therefore, assigned prominence. Using a spoken corpus, this study sought to re-examine this distinction and test various categories of NLWs in two registers (academic and business registers) and across two speaker types (native English speakers and Hong Kong English speakers). Results from quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that NLWs indeed might be assigned prominence consistently in both registers and both types of speakers and that prominence is often triggered by what speakers deem communicatively profitable. However, variation between NLW categories was observed, with negations, interjections, and numerals tending to receive prominence significantly more than other categories. Furthermore, within-category variation was also present – particularly in determiners, modal verbs, and auxiliary verbs – and usually is attributed to register and speaker differences. The findings suggest that pronunciation teachers should not teach learners prosodic prominence based on the inherent linguistic properties of words but on the situational informativity of their message.