Intonational Pragmatics

The question of whether and how intonation patterns bear meanings is an old one, usually evaluated with reference to imagined or elicited speech. This study takes an interactional linguistic approach instead, examining intonation and meaning in naturally occurring interaction. The pattern considered here is a French intonation contour involving a salient initial accent and a low primary accent. This intonation pattern could be analysed as the so-called accent d'insistance, which is often said to have pragmatic meanings such as intensification and contrastive focus. This article analyses the uses of this contour in repeats. When used in repeats of an interlocutor's speech, the contour indicates unproblematic receipt of the repeated talk, making a confirming response optional, and contrasts with a final rise pattern used in repeats that initiate repair and request confirmation. However, in two other types of repetitions (self-repetition of a previously made assessment, and modified self-repetition for correction purposes), there is indeed interactional evidence supporting the argument that the contour helps convey the pragmatic meanings intensification and contrastive focus, respectively. It is argued that all of these meanings are achieved through the interplay of semiotic resources of several kinds (prosodic, verbal and sequential properties of talk), and that the contour itself has no inherent, context-independent meaning. The empirical findings presented suggest that the autonomy of intonation in the achievement of meaning has been overemphasised.

Lafkioui, M. (2009). L'intonation et sa fonction de structurateur hiérarchique des syntagmes propositionnels sans indice morphématique. Le cas du tarifit. In S. Chaker, A. Mettouchi, & G. Phillipson (a cura di), Etudes de phonétique et linguistique berbères. Hommage à Naïma Louali ...

This study addresses the relationship between information structure and intonation in French. Using an interactive speech production experiment, we tested the hypothesis that the French initial rise (LHi) is used to mark the left edge of a contrastively focused constituent. Since the occurrence of the initial rise is also known to be sensitive to the length of an Accentual Phrase (AP), we manipulated AP length within the same experiment in a 2x2 design. This allowed us to explore the issue of whether the initial rise represents a true marker of focus in the traditional sense, or whether the association is less direct. The results show that both focus and phrase length make contributions to the distribution of the initial rise, but with no interaction. We argue that these findings are incompatible with a model that assumes a direct mapping between focus and the initial rise, and that the relatively weak association can nevertheless be informative in a model of interpretation that integrates multiple probabilistic inputs to initial rise occurrence. These findings represent the first quantitative experimental assessment of focus realization in French in a non-corrective context, and establish a previously undocumented link between the initial rise and discourse-level meaning.

Intonational change studies in the literature only amount to contact-induced change. A seek for universals may only proceed through extensive example drilling and comparative research, since triggers of distinct outcomes usually show phonetic (thus, language-specific) differences. The most natural candidate to be a universal, non language-specific, factor influencing change is pragmatics, and answers may come from intonational phonology, which analyses the correspondence between phonetic form and pragmatic function. However, it is not easy to find minimal pairs only differing in pragmatics (sentence-type) undergoing different evolutions in time. To complicate the picture, iconicity (Givón 1990), namely a tendency to one-to-one form-function correspondence, is highly disrespected in intonational phonology, especially in situations of bilingual or multiple repertory and systems show, on one side, different contours associated to the same pragmatic sentence type (intonational allophony, or redundancy, often a product of bilingualism) and on the other side, different pragmatic functions represented by the same contour (polysemy, ambiguity). As to the distribution of allophonic variation in multiple repertories, Chambers and Trudgill (1998) distinguish two kinds of systems: whilst mixing systems have 2 well distinct phonetic forms in the repertory, each one associated to a language of origin, fudging systems show intermediate phonetic patterns with characteristics of both original patterns. Accommodation Theory (Giles et al. 1991) is based on the claim that long-term convergence of patterns is the result of extensive short-term accommodation of speakers, and Trudgill (2014) suggested that long-lasting change is gradual and happens " below the level of conscious awareness ". In a study on the evolution of the intonation of two groups of bilingual speakers in Majorca, Romera and Elordieta (2013) observe that the contour used for statements and that of questions evolved in two different ways, in that the two groups' original patterns would phonetically converge to an intermediate form and their shape gradually approach one another only in the case of questions. Dealing with different allophonic distributions, the authors did not ascribe the different behaviour to the pragmatics of questions vs statements but to the difference in saliency of the contours' shape, that is, a (contingent) characteristic of the phonetic form. Our work starts from the analysis of the phonological system of the variety of Italian spoken by two age groups from Pescara (eastern Italy). Studying the intonational contours associated with 35 sentence types we found, by the elder speakers, the same allophonic variety of pitch accents associated to 2 different sentence types, contrastive statements and information-seeking yes-no questions, consisting (figure 1) of 2 main pitch accents, A) a " pretonic peak " fall, transferred from the local language, Pescarese, with a high peak aligned at the end of the pretonic syllable, and B) a " tonic peak " late fall with a peak fully inside the tonic wowel, influenced from Rome Italian, together with a minority of intermediate patterns, being either overlapping patterns (a " double " pretonic+tonic peak (C1) pattern and its " extended peak " variant (C2), with the two peaks joined by a plateau) or a midway pattern (a single " midway peak " (D) usually aligned between the onset and the nucleus of the tonic syllable. When coming to the youngsters, however, the evolution of this common distribution proves to be sensitive to sentence type: when associated to contrastive focus, the main, well distinguished, pitch accents A) and B) keep prevailing in number, in a predominatly mixing system, and the number of intermediate patterns, being especially overlapping patterns, mildly increases, whereas in information-seeking questions the midway fudged type D) outnumbers A) and B). Dealing with the same range of phonetic shapes undergoing change across the two sentence types, and having different outcomes, this difference in change type can only depend on sentence-type (and not on the phonetic shape itself) and is compatible with the hypothesis that questions, being more interactive, listener-oriented sentence types, may trigger change " below the level of consciousness " and therefore are more prone, as a long-term effect, to gradual phonetic convergence of contours to midway fudged forms, more than contrastive statements, which are a more speaker-oriented, type, favoring maintainance.

The main aim of this paper is to test the claim that intonation plays an important role in the specification of dynamic epistemic commitments, i.e., speaker commitments to the speaker’s own proposition and to the addressee’s propositions. In an acceptability judgment task, 119 Central Catalan listeners were asked to rate the perceived degree of acceptability between a set of interrogative utterances (variously produced with one of four intonational contours) and their immediate discourse context (which was controlled for epistemic bias). We found that participants preferred some question intonation contours over others in specific epistemic contexts. That is, results show that question intonation encodes fine-grained information about the epistemic stance of the speaker, not only in relation to the speaker’s own propositions but also in relation to the addressee’s propositions.

Can preschoolers make pragmatic inferences based on the intonation of an utterance? Previous work has found that young children appear to ignore intonational meanings and come to understand contrastive intonation contours only after age six. We show that four-year-olds succeed in interpreting an English utterance, such as “It LOOKS like a zebra”, to derive a conversational implicature, namely [but it isn't one], as long as they can access a semantically stronger alternative, in this case “It's a zebra”. We propose that children arrive at the implicature by comparing such contextually provided alternatives. Contextually leveraged inferences generalize across speakers and contexts, and thus drive the acquisition of intonational meanings. Our findings show that four-year-olds and adults are able to bootstrap their interpretation of the contrast-marking intonation by taking into account alternative utterances produced in the same context.

The main aim of this paper is to test the claim that intonation plays an important role in the specification of dynamic epistemic commitments, i.e., speaker commitments to the speaker’s own proposition and to the addressee’s propositions. In an acceptability judgment task, 119 Central Catalan listeners were asked to rate the perceived degree of acceptability between a set of interrogative utterances (variously produced with one of four intonational contours) and their immediate discourse context (which was controlled for epistemic bias). We found that participants preferred some question intonation contours over others in specific epistemic contexts. That is, results show that question intonation encodes fine-grained information about the epistemic stance of the speaker, not only in relation to the speaker’s own propositions but also in relation to the addressee’s propositions.

One of the most common explanations for the meaning of intonation is the expression of speaker attitude, usually described thorough the use of specific adjectival descriptors (e.g., angry, surprised). However, the concept of attitude in intonational studies is fundamentally different from attitude as it is used in research in the social sciences. Important differences between the two traditions of attitude research are discussed and it is argued that attitude is an inadequate concept to describe intonational meaning because of the the idiosyncratic definition used for intonational research.