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Meanings of Intonational Contours

Meanings of Intonational Contours. Julia Hirschberg CS 6998. Today. Approaches to understanding contour meaning What scheme for describing intonation do they use? What difference does this make? What kind of evidence do they look at? Which is most persuasive? Which is easiest to study?

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Meanings of Intonational Contours

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  1. Meanings of Intonational Contours Julia Hirschberg CS 6998

  2. Today • Approaches to understanding contour meaning • What scheme for describing intonation do they use? • What difference does this make? • What kind of evidence do they look at? • Which is most persuasive? • Which is easiest to study? • How would you determine what an intonational contour ‘means’?

  3. Sag & Liberman on Intonation and Indirect Speech Acts ‘75 • Direct vs. Indirect Speech Acts • Illocutionary force (e.g. asking) • Perlocutionary effect (e.g…..) • Can you open that window? • Wh-questions • ‘Real’: • “tilde contour” – why? • “hat pattern”

  4. Negative-implicating rhetorical: • Hat pattern (if second accent highest) • Evidence? • Surprise/redundancy: The blackboard’s painted orange! • How do we conclude that any intonation contour “means” X? • YNQs: • ‘Real’: rising or falling • Indirect request: plateau or falling

  5. Production studies: recorded read skits • Tilde  real wh-q • Neg-implicating wh: second accent more prominent than first • Perception studies: match recording to context • Tilde  real wh-q and not other • Late peak  either • Terminal rise  real ynq

  6. Conclusion: some contours can ‘freeze’ a pragmatic interpretation?

  7. Hirschberg & Ward ’92: Rise/fall/rise (L*+H L-H%) • The question: why does one contour have different meanings? • Uncertainty/incredulity or lack of speaker commitment to some scalar value • When will it mean one over the other? • Hypothesis: variation in F0, amplitude, duration, voice quality • Experiment:

  8. Record same sentence with each interpretation (pretest) • Analyze each token to extract acoustic and prosodic features of hypothesis • Resynthesize tokens exchanging all possible combinations of F0, RMS, duration and spectral features of ‘uncertainty’ tokens with ‘incredulity’ tokens

  9. Forced choice task: uncertainty or incredulity? • Results: F0 and spectral features influence uncertainty/incredulity distinction although amplitude and duration also differ

  10. A Compositional Account (Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg ’92) • Contours convey relationahips • Between current, prior, and following utterances • Between propositional content and mutual beliefs • Contour meanings are composites of the meanings of their pitch accents, phrase accents and boundary tones

  11. Pitch Accents • Convey information status about discourse references, modifiers, predicates and their relationship to S and H’s mutual beliefs • H*: X is new and predicated My name is H* Mark H* Liberman H-H% • L*: X is salient but not part of the speaker’s predication …L* Stalin was L* right H-H% • H*+L: X is inferable from S and H’s mutual beliefs and part of the predication H*+L Don’t H*+L forget to H*+L take your H* lunch L-L%

  12. H+L* (H+!H*): X is inferable from S and H’s mutual beliefs but not part of predication She’s H+L* teething L-L% • L*+H: X is part of a scale but not part of the predication …I fed the L*+H goldfish L-H% • L+H*: X is part of a scale and in S and H’s mutual beliefs (narrow focus) I don’t L+H* want L+H* shrimp L-H% I want L+H* lobster L-L%

  13. Phrase Accents • Convey relationships among intermediate phrases, such as which form part of larger interpretive units • L-: X L- Y means X and Y are interpreted separately from one another Do you want a sandwich L- or would you like a soda • H-: X H- Y means X and Y should be interpreted together Do you want apple juice H- or orange juice

  14. Boundary Tones • Signal the directionality of interpretation of intonational phrases • H%: X H% Y means interpret X wrt Y You made seven errors L-H% What a shame L-L% We don’t have time to continue today. • L%: X L% Y means no directionality of interpretation suggested You made seven errors L-L% What a shame L-H% We don’t have time to continue today.

  15. Unresolved Questions • How do the meanings of pitch accents in a single phrase combine? The L* blackboard’s painted H* orange L-L% • How do we distinguish the meaning of a phrase accent from that of a boundary tone – especially in intonational phrases with a single intermediate phrase? • E.g. H* H-L% (plateau) vs. H*H-H% (high-rise question) vs. H*L-L% (declarative) • Is this framework useful for investigating contour meaning? E.g. downstepped contours, H+L*

  16. Next Week • Discussion questions • Project description and preliminary bibliography

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