PROSODIC PHRASING OF THE PARENTHETICAL PAL UN 'PLEASE' IN ESTONIAN REQUESTS

This study investigates the prosody of the Estonian parenthetical palun 'please' in imperative requests. The occurrence of prosodic phrase boundary cues such as pauses, pre-boundary lengthening, and creaky voice as well as pitch characteristics and accentuation are analysed. The analysis is based on 753 utterances, where palun appears in three different positions: initial, medial or final. The requests were elicited using context descriptions from 21 female speakers of Estonian.The results show that palun is not phrased as a separate intonation phrase and that its intonation and accentuation vary depending on its position in the host utterance. Utterance-initially, palun always receives an intonational pitch accent while utterance finally it is unaccented. It is concluded that the integrated prosody of palun may derive from its discourse marker-like function. Its prosody may be representative of certain other categories of parentheticals with similar functional properties such as comment clauses and reporting verbs, but different from functionally more independent parentheticals that express a proposition or speech act of their own.