Phrasal verbs and intonation

The British National Corpus reports 666 instances ...

<wonders_of_computicles>
(just click on that link and watch while the search unfold. 

<INLINE_PS DATE="2019">
This has stopped working. You can run the search for yourself with the search string    run in    (no quotation marks, no vinculum, just those two words).
</INLINE_PS>

</wonders_of_computicles>

... of run in – a (suitably) devilish number – and devilish it is, for students of ESOL at least.

I've written before (here) about phrasal verbs:

...I hadn't realized, until I started to  teach ESOL, what a big hurdle phrasal verbs were. Try Googling English Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs. You get (or at least I get – Heaven alone knows what customized search algorithms are at play) over 500,000 hits. That's a world of pain for ESOL students; who have to remember not only apparently-paradoxical meanings but a range of syntactic oddities. And to make things worse, we English-speakers keep inventing new ones....

(If you're new to this blog, you might want to have a read [and on the subject of problems for ESOL students, what about "have a read"?]

Phrasal verbs are a huge problem, even if you consider only the ones that are listed in the thousands of  dictionaries and web-pages and other lists of all kinds, but as I said in that excerpt we English-speakers keep inventing new ones. And a mis-reading on the news just now alerted me to a new one.

Intonation was the tell-tale slip (as it often is). The newsreader said [of a rugby player,  voicing over a bit of VT] "Here he is, running in a try". But run in, except in the context of internal combustion engines isn't usually a phrasal verb. It is very commonly (in most if not all of those BNC hits I mentioned earlier – here's one of the first of those 666: "...if we allow it to run in the way the government have in mind...") a prepositional usage; the verb run and the preposition in just happen to fall together.

So the voice said (or, to give him his due, he bailed out as soon as he realized that the words in a try were not a meaning-bearing unit [or semanteme, as I regret some linguists feel it necessary to say]):

 ... as he would have said if the words had been

Here he is, running in his Nth race.

He didn't know that in the world of rugby (I only have experience of Rugby Union, being a feeble effete Southerner, but I don't see why it shouldn't also be used in the world of Rugby League) run in is a transitive phrasal verb – referring to an easy, almost unopposed try (which, for our American readers, is not unlike a touch-down  – with the possibly counter-intuitive difference that it involves TOUCHING THE BALL DOWN).

The correct intonation would be one introductory phrase of three words, and then running in his Nth try in a separate and continuous rising and falling curve:

In a phrasal verb, both the main verb and the preposition (often, for clarity, called a particle in this context) usually (if not always – though I'll have to think about that) belong in the same intonational curve; by starting a new intonational curve at the onset of the preposition the speaker disrupts the meaning of the phrasal verb. But you can't get the intonation  right  if you don't understand the context. And phrasal verbs are readily created in specific contexts.

<autobiographical_note date_range="early 1971">
This puts me in mind of my days down and out in Barcelona. I didn't speak Spanish and hadn't done it at school; I had an O-level grammar book (not aimed at self-study), and was reading it. My daily budget extended to a copy of La Vanguardia (so not that down and out), which I scanned diligently. Articles in the sections dealing with international affairs, current events, politics and so on were not too difficult to make sense of: the vocabulary – with, on the face of it, "harder" vocabulary – was often guessable on the basis of cognates in other modern languages and/or Greek or Latin-based etymology.

Not so the sports pages  – and not just in sports I knew nothing about, such as handball, pelota, or (though the word sport is questionable in this case) bull-fighting. Even, say, reports about football (aka soccer) were a closed book to me. The words and the syntax associated with them was just not the same as you get from books.
</autobiographical_note>

Anyway, the point is this: phrasal verbs are, in the case I have looked at, just the prompt for the recognition of a problem with intonation. (Or vice versa. Often, in language teaching, a problem in one sphere points to a problem in another. So there's a lesson for teachers here: if you hear a problem, don't be satisfied with just "fixing" it – when you think about it, you might find that it's a symptom of another problem.)

Enough for now...

b

PS: A crossword clue:

• Weight of the Holocaust – he doesn't believe it. (6)
  
  

Update: 2017.02.11.14:15  – Added PPS


PPS And another:

• Leaders of other teams interrupt scrum – for keeping balls in? (7)
  
  

Update: 2017.02.13.15:15  – Added PPPS

PPPS

Added a clarification, in the main text, in blue, and yet another clue:

• Average quantity? Much more important than that! (9)
  
  

Update: 2017.04.15.15:55  – Those answers, at last: 

1. DENIER
2. SCROTUM
3. PARAMOUNT

Update: 2019.10.8.11:10  – Added inline PS

Lies, damned lies, and intonation

A few months ago I discussed (here) the strange way that reported speech not only attenuates the intonation of direct speech but actually misrepresents it.  On a train more recently I noticed a case that is just totally artificial – lying in wait for the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) student just when they are at their most vulnerable, and providing a model of inaccurate intonation. A recording comes over the Tannoy:

We will shortly be arriving at <station-name> 

If one said this in the course of normal conversation (in a rather Ionesco-esque surreal universe?) the intonation would be something like this:

But instead of recording We will shortly be arriving at Iver, We will shortly be arriving at Langley, We will shortly be arriving at Slough ... etc etc ad nauseam, and running up enormous recording bills, they have recorded just We will shortly be arriving at ... (note the "...", what happens when there‘s nothing to be said is ironically quite significant) ...

...and separate recordings  of individual station names.

So what the disembodied voice says is

There are two problems with this, both having to do with the way a native speaker strings sounds together, one of which works in the student's favour:

1. Pro
   There is no assimilation – the squidging of sounds together to make connected speech. For example, the /æt/ (or, more probably, /ət/) can (and often does) change in sympathy with whatever follows. If the next station is Maidenhead, for example, starting with the bilabial /m/, a native speaker saying the whole sentence might say /əp 'meɪdənhed/ (with the dental /t/ becoming the equivalent bilabial stop /p/).
   

   <festive_note theme="point of articulation">
   In Rutter‘s Shepherd's Pipe Carol the refrain starts 

   Angels in the sky

   Came down from on high.... 

   ... a bit of a tongue-twister I find (nearly every Christmas). Musing on points of articulation, I recently realized why; although clarity of enunciation isn't my forte, anyone might find the second line a bit of a trouble-maker (aided and abetted by the context established in the first). The consonants in came are the velar /k/ and the bilabial nasal /m/; down starts with a /d/ (dental) and ends with another dental (but this time it's the nasal /n/); from starts with a consonant pair – but the first is the labio-dental /f/, and at the end there's another bilabial nasal. 

   So the points of articulation (places where sounds are made, but in this case [beginnings and ends] articulation also works in  the same way as it does in an articulated lorry):

   
   

   CAME                                                      Velar (back of mouth) 

                                                                           last: Bilabial (front of mouth)
   

   DOWN                                                     Dental (halfway back) 

                                                           last: Dental (again) 

   FROM                                                   Labio-dental (not quite  

                                                                                  the front, but pretty near)

                                                 last: Bilabial 

   Just considering the first consonant in these three words (marked in bold), there is no problem: 

    Came down from... 

   Velar => Dental => Labio-dental – the point of articulation is moving steadily forwards. But factoring in the ends of the words, the peaceful (pastoral?) picture is disrupted. After the bilabial nasal at the end of Came there is the temptation to take the path of least resistance...

   <digression> 

   The path of least resistance is often significant in the way speech sounds develop, but... Update, maybe.

   </digression>  

   ...and say from; besides, came from is a temptingly Christmassy collocation – came from afar/the East/Nazareth... 

   So I often find myself singing Came from down... and it's not until I bump  into the down/high paradox that my voice peters out.
   </festive_note>

2. Con
   When the component bits of recording are spliced together, the intonation is totally wrong. There are two components: the first ends in an upward flick, a sort of auditory serif, that  has the meaning  "..." (in conversation  this rising tone warns: I HAVEN'T FINISHED YET, SO DON'T INTERRUPT); the second starts the place-name with a rising tone, which again gives the wrong message (as a rising tone often signifies HERE COMES A NEW TOPIC).

On the homeward journey I listened again to the Tannoy. And surprisingly (not to say inefficiently, on the same service run by the same company, but just in the opposite direction) the intonation pattern was different: it still wasn't right, but at least the first bit didn't have the misleading upward flick at the end; and the intonation at the beginning of each place-name at least did not start by rising.

Still unnatural, with the tone leaping up to mark the splice, but not so bad.

But ESOL students arriving from their home countries certainly have their work cut out. 

b

PS And here's a clue:

Sat up 60% of the way through loud passage, but too late for this. (9)

Update 2016.02.11.14:15 – Fixed a few typos, deleted old footer and added PPS.

PPS The possible update mentioned in the digression from the festive note (which itself was something of a digression) has taken the form of a new post. And here's another clue:

Beseech Barnaby (fat chance!)  (8)

Update 2016.02.12.10:30 – Added PPPS

PPPS A further thought on the subject of point of articulation, that arose last summer and may be of interest to choral singers. My choir was singing a setting of these words (from The Merry Wives of Windsor):

Pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about,
Till candles and star-light and moonshine be out.

These are the last words of the piece, with very quick notes and an extreme diminuendo, so it's important to watch the conductor. It seemed to me that the only way to do this was to learn it by heart. So far so unsurprising. The three nouns in the last line were a problem; how to remember the order?

Then I realized how clever (intuitive?, lucky?) Shakespeare had been. The points of articulation of the initial consonants move from the back of the mouth to the front:

/k/ (velar) > /s/ (alveolar ridge) > /m/ (bilabial)

So, as the music dwindles away to nothing (or a niente, as the Italians have it) the choir can whisper more and more with the point of articulation moving closer and closer to the audience and maintaining clarity.

Update 2016.03.12.17:50 – Supplied crossword answers:

FORETASTE and BEGRUDGE

Intonation revisited

Late last week I heard a BBC continuity announcer (or news summary reader – I tried to track her down on iPlayer, but found I have no future as a cyberstalker) make a mistake of intonation that betrayed her ignorance of the Beautiful Game. It was about England fielding its "first team" (that is, its first choice of players) against San Marino. I reproduce here (in the first of the pair) a representation of the appropriate intonation to convey this meaning:

<excuse> 

Apologies for the somewhat basic graphics (basic in comparison with the ones I used here, in my first post about intonation). 20-odd years of experience with the graphics  capabilities of The Dark Side outweigh less than a year with Android.

</excuse>

But she used the second intonation – which would have been appropriate in the case of a record-breaking event or achievement, such as this:

Fig. 2

This example led me to reread last May's post about the way stress can affect meaning.  In a digression there I said of some aperçu  I had quoted:

<autobiographical note> 

It may have been mentioned in a lecture by the then Doctor, now Professor, Erik Fudge (though he may have read it somewhere else). 

</autobiographical note>

Thinking to avoid a digression too far I didn't mention another, which has been simmering away at the back of my mind. Well the metaphorical steam has been building up for several months, and the pressure has got too much for me; so here is that thought:

<suppressed_meta_digression phase="preamble">
The intonation patterns in direct and indirect speech differ; the information conveyed by the intonation is more specific in the case of direct speech. Look at these two:

Fig. 3

The first, of course, is the more dramatic; moreover, the gradient of the arc is infinitely variable. In contrast, the arc in the case of indirect speech is much flatter, and if the reporter wants to vary the reported utterance's force all they can do is add something adverbial and/or change the verb. Here are three possibilities:

Fig, 4

(The possibilities are almost limitless, given the range  of adverbials and substitute verbs, and they all have pretty flat intonation, but at least there‘s some variation.)

But look what‘s happened to the high point of the intonation curve. In the original direct speech [shown in the first of the pair, Fig.3] , the intonation reaches its peak at the word away, but in the expanded versions [shown in Fig. 4] it doesn't. Perhaps this might be referred to as "intonatio praecox": the intonation in the report reaches its climax earlier than in the actual speech.

In the report of that direct speech, though [shown in Fig 5], while the contour of the arc is necessarily different [but hold that thought: necessarily?] the peak  is on the same word:

Fig. 5

<autobiographical_note>

To use the words my brother learnt when he was doing geology at O-level, it has a scarp slope (for the first part of the actual speech)  and a dip slope for the end of the actual speech plus the predicate. 

</autobiographical_note.>

</suppressed_meta_digression>

<suppressed_meta_digression phase="NECESSARILY">
In reports of direct speech, the intonation is inaccurate. It would be possible to use intonation such as that shown in Fig. 6, which would be closer to the truth of the speech event:

Fig. 6
"Accurate" but unnatural intonation,
with the direct speech starting and ending at the same pitch

But that's just not the way English intonation works. You may hear this sort of intonation in dramatic readings, but the less "accurate" version shown in Fig. 5 is the conversational  norm.

<afterthought>
Maybe this intonation defines a dramatic reading: as the initial arc of the quoted speech begins and ends at the same level, it's easier to forget that the reader is there at all. On the other hand, in the more common (Fig. 5) intonation, the reporter hi-jacks the original speaker's intonation, flattening out the dip slope – and effectively saying 'I'm here'. [I'm not sure about this though  – feel free to disagree.]
</afterthought>

</suppressed_meta_digression> 

b

PS Another clue: Hang about, that is a foundation. (7)

Update, 2015.10.16.10:20 – Added esprit d'escalier in blue.

Update, 2015.12.06.10:40 – OK, that's long enough. The solution to that clue: LINGERIE.

---

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each e cvowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

I cannot stress enough

Last night on the BBC television news the newsreader – who was, incidentally, a woman, though this sort of slip is not in the immortal words of Wossname [one of the usual suspects in the field of iambic pentameters; Shakespeare...? Milton...?...] A malady most incident to maids'   – got her intonation wrong.

Maybe it was a typo in the auto-cue, maybe it was a mis-reading.

It was caused by a not very common (but still quite common) phrasal verb: rein in: this is pronounced with the dying fall on the ↘in. But the context was a piece about Magna Carta, with its associations with kingship. So reined became reigned in the mind of the auto-cue-writer-or-newsreader-no-names-no-packdrill.

And, as my last sentence cunningly showed ...

<self_congratulation> 

I have to admit I'm fairly pleased with this, although I did cheat a bit, by using reign as an object: in real life, 'reigned in' is a fairly rare occurrence, except in sentences like 'King John reigned in the 13th century' or 'Charles I reigned in an atmosphere of suspicion' or 'The young king's uncle reigned in his stead' or 'The pre-revolutionary kings reigned in complete oblivion...'.... Hmm. For 'fairly rare' read 'not uncommon'. 

</self_congratulation>

...when reigned is followed by in like this, the stress falls on the verb itself: '↘reigned in....'

So the newsreader said 'Magna Carta ↘reined [sic] in the powers of the monarchy' with 'in the powers of the monarchy' having a single intonation pattern, with pitch starting to rise at 'in' , reaching the top of the curve at the first syllable of 'monarchy' and then falling rapidly:

So she said

                               

Whereas what she meant to say was

I don't know whether she even noticed that what she had read out was meaningless. If she did, she hid it well. But there's a lesson to be learnt here: a speaker's  intonation affects the way listeners understand the message. In this case, it forces the listener to assume a different spelling.

If I remember aright, the single intonation curve on 'in the powers of the monarchy' (in the wrong reading) marks what is known to linguists as 'a phonological word'; but...

<health_warning> 

...my understanding of theoretical linguistics terminology is a good 40 years out of date at best, and at worst I may have got the wrong end of the stick.  

</health_warning>

If this sort of thing interests you, you could start here.

But there are nettles to be grasped – and not the figurative sort; I am thinking biocide in the vegetable patch. Though I am reminded (not clearly enough to remember the exact wording) of a politician on the radio last weekend talking about 'grasping the nettle by the horns' or 'taking the bull by the nettles'. I think the precise wording was better than either of those, but you get the gist.

b

Update 2015.06.1914:30.15.30 – Added PS

PS On Tom, Dick, and Harry

I don't know where I heard it first,...

<autobiographical note>
though it was probably in the Raised Faculty Building,  le Corbusier's contribution to the Sidgwick Site
</autobiographical note>

... but it's striking how often examples adduced in Linguistics discussions tend to involve violence. The default passive-voice example, for ESOL teachers, is

The boy kicked the ball

rather than 

Jane kissed John.

Anyway, the example I want to look at now –  to reflect on how intonation can radically affect meaning – is this, which I would attribute if I could. 

<autobiographical note>
It may have been mentioned in a lecture by the then Doctor, now Professor, Erik Fudge (though he may have read it somewhere else):
</autobiographical note>

Tom hit Dick and then Harry hit him.

On the face of it this might be a tale of righteous retribution taken on Tom by Harry's friend Dick:

There are two violent interactions with two agents and two patients, denoted by two similar intonation curves –  rising/falling from/to more-or-less the same levels.

But change the intonation, keeping the same words in the same order, and a rather darker tale of both Tom and Harry ganging up on Dick emerges:

The first curve denotes Dick's suffering, but that suffering is not finished yet; the second curve starts a bit higher than the and but not as high as Tom  – Dick's travails are not finished yet, and the end of the intonation curve is lower than the first. There's an up-tick in the intonation to mark the pause between blows, but the general sense of the whole sentence is downward.

I have no idea (with my ESOL teacher's hat on) of how to teach this intonation; like most useful language skills it can only improve with exposure, practice, and if possible immersion.

When Kant can

More than a year ago (March 2013 is the date on the draft), I made a note about an Italian interpreter on a news programme – no more specific reference, but probably The World at One or the Nine O'clock News:

/hæz tʊ bi:/ - sounded negative - not vowel, but voicing indicates polarity: /hæs tə/ vs /hæzn tə/

I wonder what this meant... Aha – got it. It follows from a point that I became aware of a while ago.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1979" theme="assimilation">

<digression theme="assimilation">
A few days ago this appeared in the twittersphere:

I suspect (the results aren't out yet, but here comes a spoiler) the process whereby /gri:n/ and /kəʊm/ combine to form /gri:ŋ kəʊm/ is assimilation (well, I know it is, but I don't know whether this will be a good enough answer; they might want me to say whether it's progressive or regressive, and I must have nodded off at that part of the lecture...). Assimilation happens when some feature of a speech item (typically voicing or place of articulation) changes to match that of an adjacent item. Anyway, where was I...?
</digression>

The first proper book that I worked on after moving on from the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations  (when I was just temping to see me through my first winter as a freelance polymath) was Geoffrey Sampson's Liberty and Language. It was either here, or in his next book or in editorial discussions in connection with it (unlikely, as they were pretty one-sided ), that he made the observation that it was almost as if there was a new modal, /tə hæftə/ [to haffto], because the voicing of /hæv/ assimilates to the unvoiced /t/ of the 'to' that always follows it (in this modal use). He had even heard a politician saying 'it's a question of haffing to'.
</autobiographical_note>

When a person is involved in a conversation, many things are going on. Apart from the social and physical things (eye contact and so on) and contextual information surrounding the actual event, the participant's brain is having to process a bewildering amount of information [stay with me here, I'm coming back to that Italian interpreter eventually]. Somewhere – I'm pretty sure it was in Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language – I saw an account of a conference that set out to analyse a few hours of recorded language. The proceedings of the conference, in the event, were published under the name The First Five Minutes – which contained a book's worth of analysis; the publisher had decided that analysis of all the data would make the book unpublishably big.

In a live speech event, the hearer has a vast amount to do. Which brings us to the Italian interpreter that started all this. The brain of the hearer starts perceiving speech sounds, and then parsing^† them, as soon as possible. Making guesses about where a speech event is going is the only way of participating in a conversation. If you wait until all the inputs are in, and then work out what you want to say in response, and then work out how to say it, you'll have missed your turn^‡ (experto crede  [that's Latin for 'trust me, I know what I'm talking about'].)

So what the listener does is take in clues and cues about what's going to happen^††. In the pair "/hæstə/ ['has to'] versus  /hæznʔtə/ [hasn't to]" the first clue to the negativeness is the voicing of the /z/; the hearer, in the press of efforts to understand what's coming, thinks 'here comes a negative'.

Now, when that interpeter said /hæz tʊ bi:/ I heard the voicing of the /z/ and thought 'Here comes a negative'.

<digression>
The assimilation of the /z/ to the /t/ in the positive involves  voicing rather than place of articulation  – as in the case of /gri:ŋ kəʊm/  (from that #Phonetics quiz) or perhaps (in tribute to my alma mater) I should say /gri:ŋ kɪŋ/ [that's a 'Greene King' reference; if you don't speak fluent IPA don't worry {And I don't mean Greene King IPA, of course}].
</digression>

The inappropriately enunciated /tʊ/ isn't just wrong in an understandable way, it is plain misleading. This (distant, now) speech event underlines something I have often noticed, both as a student of foreign languages and as a teacher of English: one of the features of connected, live, language use is knowing when not to over-pronounce; getting everything right, at the word level, is going to result in getting it wrong at the sentence level.

More recently, the problem of distinguishing between positive and negative arose in the UsingEnglish forum devoted to Pronunciation and Phonetics, but there are things I need to be getting on with; so that will have to wait for an update.

b

Update 2014.05.17.19:00 – Added PS:

PS
That UsingEnglish discussion started with the question What is different between "can" and "can't" when say them.. The question reminded me of my unfinished blog (which, now I think of it, has a title that has made no sense at all until this Update ). The questioner asked:

I am just wondering how English-speekers distinguish these two phases (or words). It seams the only different is the hard-to-heard "t". Then why the language choose this way to indicate total opposite meaning?

As I (eventually) answered, the problem is specific to American English:

Of course, the problem doesn't arise in Br English (though I'm sure many others do ): /kæn/ versus /kɑ:nt/ - and whatever happens to the /t/ the vowel is still distinct..

So I left it to an American contributor to answer before I stuck my oar in.

After correcting 'different', he (I assume he's a he) said

The answer is that to those who know the phonemes of English, the "t" is not at all difficult to hear. When you try to learn a new language, you are forced to begin with the phonemes you are used to, since those are all the phonemes you know. They are all the phonemes that have been relevant to discriminating meaning in the languages you know. But if the foreign language uses other phonemes, your ear is not programmed to hear those other phonemes, because they have never been relevant in your past experience.

I felt this was a bit over-dismissive of the questioner's 'hard to hear[d]', so I leapt to the questioner's defence:

I wouldn't question Newbie's 'hard-to-hear'. I remember in the late '50s being very confused by Perry Como, in 'Magic Moments', singing 'Time can't erase the memory...'. [T]he context (particularly the phrase 'erase the memory') makes it clear this is 'can't'; but I had never met the expression at the time. I suppose this just reinforces the point about  phonemes; I didn't know the phonemes of Am Eng.

But another American English speaker has now added weight to my defence:

It's not uncommon to have to say "I'm sorry - did you say 'can' or 'can't'?" 

I'm not sure what to make of this. Until I read that latest response I thought native speakers could always tell, and that the first answer's 'phonemes of English' just meant 'the phonemes of American English' . Now I'm not so sure.

Update 2014.05.19.11:30 – Added this note:

^†I can feel the eyebrows jerking up here, particular among readers of an age to remember the old Parse and explain exercise in schools (which makes those readers older even than ME – their English teachers would have insisted on 'older than I'). 

 <autobiographical_note date_range="1963-1968" theme="schoolbooks">
I was just on the cusp, with a mixture of prescriptive and more permissive schoolbooks. As our Latin master was Father Provincial [="Big Cheese"] of the Salvatorians (Society of the Divine Saviour), the school had fingers (tentacles?) in many ...erm...pumice stones?; so we tended to get young besuited trainees among the cassocks, flown in for a term or two here and there. These preferred the more permissive/expressive books and parts of the syllabus.
</autobiographical_note>

But by 'parsing' I don't mean 'third person singular of the pluperfect' sort of parsing; I mean simply taking bits of linguistic input and trying to imagine syntactic structures that they might fit in: 'Who's doing the <verb>-ing?, rather than 'Is that the subject of the main clause?  – which, when you think about it, amounts to more or less the same thing.

Update 2015.10.20.12:40 – Added this note, and a few afterthoughts in maroon:

^‡ On re-reading 18 months after the fact, I realize that I was using a semi-technical term here  – semi because although it doesn't really look like one, I was using it to refer to something with technical connotations. I think it was Grice who introduced the notion of a turn in a conversation, although I wouldn't be surprised if it was an idea that had been knocking around for many years before Grice propounded his Maxims. (But don't take this as Gospel: my linguistics studies just pre-dated Grices's popularity in linguistics circles [although he was publishing "in my time", and I'm sure I'd have come across him if I'd been a more diligent student]. My acquaintance with Grice [understanding of him would be a bit of an overstatement] is derived from some mugging-up I had to do before teaching an AS set [as described here].)

Update 2015.10.22.09:40 – Added this footnote

^††The idea of reacting (as a listener) ahead of hearing the whole message was underlined on the TV news last night. The interviewer asked something like 'Is there any risk to British security in China's involvement in ...<whatever>?' the Chinese spokesman, speaking in English, said 'Absolutely not.'

But the normal intonation for 'Absolutely not' is one rise and fall: ↷. But he said

'↘ Absolutely... ↘ ...not'

and for a split second [until he said the second word] I thought he was making a most undiplomatic admission. (One would think that a speaker of a tone-language might have been aware of this  – but I suppose there's no reason to think that skill with his sort of intonation (where tones affect meanings of single words) implies sensitivity to mine (where intonation patterns affect overall meanings of utterances).

Update 2015.10.22.12:55 – Added this PPS

PPS On reflection (as frequently happens after a Tai Chi lesson)  this expectation (of 'intonational sensitivity') was unreasonable. As an  ESOL student this Chinese-speaker would have met (and possibly drilled) the use of  'Absolutely' as a standalone response. In this case, the intonation is ↷. So he might have thought of this as the canonical intonation pattern for 'Absolutely',  and this might well have been reinforced by the fact that this intonation pattern is a close match to the Chinese rising-and-falling pattern  – 'L1-interference' as we say in the trade, when a feature of a learner's mother-tongue influences their learning of another.

Update 2018.06.17.10:55 –Added clarification in red.