Tuesday, March 4, 2008

"yeah right" again

Eureka! I posted about the prosody of the phrase "yeah right" some time ago here. In particular, I claimed there are 3 three interpretations of the phrase, but I don't have one of them in my dialect (Northern California), namely what I called "back-channel (sentiment agreement)" which is roughly equivalent to ‘mm-hmm’. However, I had no sound files. Now I've found a near perfect example of this mystery prosody in the trailer for Juno, about 36 seconds in (here).

You can also read my most excellent review of Juno here.

No comments:

TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...