Abstract
This corpus-based study focuses on the spoken nature of insubordination (Evans 2007) by analyzing intonation vis-a-vis interpersonal functions associated with specific insubordination patterns in spontaneously produced Czech conversations. The present research shows that there is a consistent relationship between the epistemic function of a given variant and its intonational contour: the pattern found in argumentative settings is associated with a conclusive, sharply falling cadence, while the variant found in collaborative contexts and imparting an explicative flavor has a slightly rising melody, suggesting inconclusiveness.
We also discovered a clear parallelism between these two intonational variants and an intonational split in the embedded polar questions after the verb form nevím 'I don't know', the most likely source of the insubordinate structures. This finding contributes toward motivating the interpersonal functions served by the insubordination patterns: the argumentative variant marks high degree of confidence about p not being true, while the slightly rising contour of the explicative pattern marks low degree of confidence in p being true, thus necessarily projecting tentativeness.
The results strengthen the status of these patterns as conventional grammatical units distinct from their syntactic source; show that their phonic properties provide salient interpretive cues; and can also contribute to the question of how we conceptualize the emergence of insubordination.