Prosodic analysis of idiomatic and non-idiomatic sentences in Slovenian: a production study

The main aim of the study is to observe whether and how prosody changes in Slovenian sentences with minimal idioms versus their respective literal interpretations. Minimal idioms describe syntactic constructions made up of a lexical and function word (Kržišnik, 2005; Babič, 2008), where the idiomatic meaning is conveyed as a sum of both parts and does not have a direct relationship to the meaning of the lexical word. In particular, the observed structure in the study is the verb + clitic pronoun construction, such as popihati jo (literally ‘to blow her’, idiomatically ‘to flee’). Previous studies have found that idiomatic context might have an influence on the sentence prosody, focusing in particular on L2 teaching and learning. Hence, the pitch changes within sentences with minimal idioms were observed. More specifically, the same verb + clitic pronoun structure have been used in a literal context and in two idiomatic contexts, one where the clitic pronoun might have been a potential referent to the subject and the second where the pronoun could not refer to the subject. The results have shown differences in pitch during production, which however are strongly dependent on the speaker. Such findings might shed light on how prosody works in minimal idioms in Slovenian, as well as observing how clitics in the minimal idioms are addressed. Such research might provide a ground for further research on clitics and no how idioms are processed in the brain.