Guest Lecture: Dr. Annika Schebesta (Siegen) — ‘The prosody of epistemic comment clauses in English’

Speaker: Dr. Annika Schebesta

Date & Time: Wednesday, 26th November 2025, 16:15–17:45

Title: The prosody of epistemic comment clauses in English

Place: B 211

Abstract: Epistemic comment clauses (e.g., I think, I guess, or I suppose) play an important role for expressing speaker stance and degrees of certainty in languages such as English and German, thereby serving as a valuable resource for discourse organization. While their pragmatic function appears largely similar across the two languages, previous research suggests that their prosodic realization differs considerably.

Studies on comment clauses in English (Dehé 2009; Kaltenböck 2009; Dehé and Wichmann 2010; Kaltenböck et al. 2011) show that their prosodic integration is gradient and sensitive to factors such as position, frequency, grammaticalization, and function. In German, by contrast, constructions such as ich glaube or ich denke tend to be more consistently prosodically integrated (Peters 2006; Döring 2016). These differences point to language-specific patterns of prosodic organization that learners must acquire in order to achieve target-like L2 performance.

Building on previous studies of L2 prosody (Mennen 2004; Li and Post 2014; Foltz 2021), this project investigates whether German learners of English are able to perceive and process prosodic cues that differ between their L1 and L2. The focus lies on the perception and processing of epistemic comment clauses, an area that has received less
attention compared to production-based research. The talk will present the theoretical background, summarize the relevant findings on prosodic integration in English and German, and discuss ideas on how insights from production-based research could be replicated, extended, and applied to the study of learner prosody.