| Abstrakt: |
Interpreter Katharine Loesch in the October 1965, issue of the Quarterly Journal of Speech finds author Seymour Chatman culpable of the newest critical error, the "intonational fallacy": something like "limiting the interpreter's capacities and prerogatives for communicating ambiguities to his audience," a condition, she suggests, that derives from "hermetically sealed-off logical discussions" and "rigid preconceptions about what the language permits, applied in bits and pieces." Loesch's critique deserves the courtesy of a reply. Chatman begin with the purported misuse of the concept of "normal" intonation. Loesch finds the word demeaning, and invokes three separate pronouncements by linguist Robert Stockwell to set against it. Since one of the leading phonologists can call "normal" intonations "colorless, unemphatic, non-contrastive," it is suggested that no interpreter would wish to use them. A normal intonation contour is simply one which conveys the sense of the morphemes and their embedding structure with a minimum of external implication, that is, no added baggage of irony, special emphasis, uncertainty, or the like. |
