This dissertation aims to extend our knowledge of prosody--in particular, what kinds of information may be conveyed through prosody, which prosodic dimensions may be used to convey them, and how individual speakers differ from one another in how they use prosody. Four production studies were conducted to examine how various factors interact with…

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of "ways of speaking" in the Nanti speech community of Montetoni, in southeastern Peruvian Amazonia, between 1999 and 2009. In the context of this study, a way of speaking is a socially meaningful, conventionalized sound pattern, manifest at the level of the utterance, that expresses the…

What are the chances of a dyad of Spanish-speaking strangers using informal address in casual, initial interactions in Buenos Aires, Argentina, today? To discover the pattern(s) of contemporary address, the Principal Investigator (PI) conducted a sociolinguistic experiment focusing on strangers' initial interactions to minimize the influence of…