Slovak ‘no’ and its pragmatic meanings and functions in relation to prosody

Abstract

This paper examines the contributions of lexical context and prosody on the perception of the Slovak particle ‘no’, [nɔ] in IPA. The functional meanings of this discourse marker are similar to those of ‘okay’ in English. Based on a literature review, we expected that the presence of the prosodic cues is not sufficient for decoding the functional meanings. We also explored how biological sex and age affected the perception of ‘no’. We found that both - context and prosody - to a great extent influence the disambiguation of ‘no’, but context provides better information about the function of Slovak ‘no’. Additionally, females and younger adults, compared with males and middle-aged adults, were more sensitive to the cues provided by context than by prosody alone.