Lexicalized intonational meaning

Christopher Potts

UMass Amherst

Maryland Linguistics Colloquium, October 1, 2004

This talk is about the rich array of intonational meanings that fall outside the purview of F(ocus)-marking systems and play a more narrowly semantic role than the tunes studied by Hirschberg, Ward, Bartels, Gunlogson, and others. Minimal pairs like those in (1)-(4) are my starting point.

(1) a.   The linguist who works on presuppositions spoke with the linguist who works on vowel harmony.
  b. # The linguist, who works on presuppositions, spoke with the linguist, who works on vowel harmony.
(2) a. # Chris asked for apricots, not apricots.
  b.   Chris asked for "[æ]pricots", not "[eI]pricots".
(3) a. # Sue didn't call the police, she called the police.
  b.   Sue didn't call the POlice, she called the poLICE.
(4) a. * Chris is so next in line.
  b.   Chris is SO next in line.

My approach resembles alternative-based theories of topic and focus, but only at an abstract level. I argue that none of the intonational effects exemplified in (1)-(4) is suitably analyzed as a topic or focus effect. What unifies them is semantic multidimensionality: in each case, the intonation produces a secondary entailment that is independent of the regular semantic content. From this perspective, we can fruitfully assign semantic denotations to intonational effects in the same way that we assign them to words.

Linguistic theory is now well situated to move beyond F-marking systems and into new areas of sound--meaning interaction. But the challenges will be as numerous and diverse as they are for topic and focus. In general, I aim to highlight these challenges and suggest techniques for meeting some of them. For those that remain mysterious to me, I'll issue precise descriptions and calls for new insights.

Some references

Bartels, Christine. 2000. The Intonation of English Statements and Questions: A Compositional Interpretation. New York: Garland.

Büring, Daniel. 1999. Topic. In Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt, eds., Focus -- Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, 142-165. Cambridge University Press. [PDF]

Gunlogson, Christine. 2001. True to Form: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English. PhD thesis, UC Santa Cruz. [PDF]

Hirschberg, Julia and Gregory Ward. 1992. The influence of pitch range, duration, amplitude and spectral features on the interpretation of the rise-fall-rise intonation contour in English. Journal of Phonetics 20:241-251. [PDF]

Ladd, Robert D. 1996. Intonational Phonology. Cambridge University Press.

Potts, Christopher. 2004. The dimensions of quotation. Draft of a paper to appear in Chris Barker and Polly Jacobson, eds., Proceedings from the Workshop on Direct Compositionality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [PDF]

Potts, Christopher. Forthcoming. The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. Oxford University Press. [Revised 2003 UC Santa Cruz PhD thesis]

Rooth, Mats. 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1:75-116.

Ward, Gregory and Julia Hirschberg. 1988. Intonation and propositional attitude: The pragmatics of L*+H L H%. In Proceedings of the Fifth Eastern States Conference on Linguistics, 512-522. [PDF]

Watson, Duane and Edward Gibson. In press. The relationship between intonational phrasing and linguistic structure. Language and Cognitive Processes. [PDF]