Speech rate is examined in this paper as a prosodic feature employed in the signaling of spontaneous narrative structure. Assuming that narratives have a structural system in itself, and that interactants mark their moves and their more global activities in order to make them unambiguous (JEFFERSON, 1978; SACKS, 1972), the present paper examines speech rate phenomena, from an acoustic-experimental approach, in 17 spontaneous narratives, using one of the most influential models for narrative analysis - the Labovian Evaluative Model (LABOV, 1972) - as framework for the analysis. The prosodic variable under investigation is analyzed on two different levels: at specific points in the narratives corresponding to section boundaries (local level), and within different sections in the narratives as a whole (global level). The results indicate that speech rate operates exclusively on the global level, by generating a cyclical pattern of varying rates corresponding to the individual, linear sections that make up narrative texts. Speech rate does not characterize narrative sections and is not manipulated on the local level in order to mark narrative boundaries.
Spontaneous narrative; Prosody; Discourse structure; Speech rate
