Abstract
A prosodic probe concerning several variants of JESTLI-clauses (both dependent and free-standing) in spoken Czech confirmed that each interpretation of the free-standing variants is associated with a distinct intonation pattern (roughly, slightly rising vs. sharply falling) and that this split is also present in the most frequently attested form of the syntactic source of the insubordination structure: the embedded Y/N questions introduced by nevím 'I don't know'. Focusing on segmental reductions (Machač 2014) of both nevím and jestli, we test the hypothesis that the segmental qualities of the JESTLI-clause play a role in the erosion of the main clause and the functional split in the resulting insubordination.
Detailed auditive analysis, supported by acoustic representations of the speech signal, suggests that the degree of word reduction (articulated through the so-called word-reduction-rate, based on the analysis of actually realized phonetic features) reflects the functional split found in the insubordination pattern: greater reduction tends to signal a high degree of speaker's uncertainty. It thus confirms our preliminary findings that even the structure shown in (2) comes in two semantic variants (uncertainty about p vs. certainty of not knowing), associated with different intonation contours.
The findings have consequences for the way we conceptualize the functional and semantic idiosyncrasies of insubordination: they may have their origin in the full hypotactic pattern and need not arise independently of them only as a result of 'losing' the main clause.