Information-Structural Semantics for English Intonation

Abstract

the present author, have offered different but related accounts of intonation structure in English and some other languages. These accounts share the assumption that the system of tones identified by Pierrehumbert (1980), as modified by Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988) and Silverman et al. (1992), has as transparent and type-driven a semantics in these languages as do their words and phrases. While the semantics of intonation in English concerns information structure and propositional attitude, rather than the predicate-argument relations and operator-scope relations that are familiar from standard semantics in the spirit of the papers collected as Montague 1974, this information-structural semantics is fully compositional, and can be regarded as a component of the same semantic system. The present paper builds on Steedman (1991) and Steedman (2000a) to develop a new semantics for intonation structure, which shares with the earlier versions the property of being fully integrated into Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG, see Steedman 2000b, hereafter SP). This grammar integrates intonation structure into surface derivational structure and the associated Montague-style compositional semantics, even when the intonation structure departs from the restrictions of traditional surface structure. Many of the diverse discourse meanings that have been attributed to intonational tunes are shown to arise via conversational implicature from more primitive literal meanings distinguished along the three dimensions of information structure, speaker/hearer commitment, and contentiousness.

Individual differences and patterns of convergence in prosody perception

“…A weak but unpredicted finding is the very small effect observed for boundary marking, where words with the lowest frequency are slightly more likely to be perceived as preceding a boundary. There is no strong basis for predicting low frequency words to be positioned at the end of a prosodic phrase, though it's possible that this weak effect in our data is related to the preference in English for topics or themes (typically given information) to be positioned at the beginning of a sentence (Steedman, 2008). …”

Integrating Contrast in a Framework for Predicting Prosody

“…[10]) rather than as being a reflection of topichood. In short, one could argue that it is not corrective topic or focus per se that is expressed differently, but that the difference is due to the low-level contrast feature that functions within both topic and focus and that topichood or focusing do not determine accent type in contrast to what has been suggested in the literature [13,14]. The above argument is corroborated by the fact that previous work [2] has shown that, for Greek, the tonal pattern for topic in declaratives is the same as the tonal pattern for focus in interrogatives and vice versa, suggesting that it is the boundary tone that "selects" NPA type, ultimately associating the latter to the discourse role of the former, further disassociating NPA type from topichood or focusing.…”

Witnessable quantifiers license type-e meaning: Evidence from contrastive topic, equatives and supplements

“…Intuitively, the intonation in (4) Rooth's (1985) alternative-based semantics for focus (Büring 1997(Büring , 2003Steedman 2008, Wagner 2008, 2012Tomioka 2010;Constant in prep.). At the heart of Rooth's interpretation system is the idea that a focused phrase generates alternatives of the same semantic type as the phrase itself.…”