Prosody-Semantics/Pragmatics

Focus sensitive operators (like only, also and even) are usually taken to operate on focus alternatives to their prejacent and, more specifically, on a contextually restricted set of propositions (‘C’) which are identical to the prejacent p, except from the focused element, which is replaced by a distinct element of the same semantic type (Rooth 1985, 1992).  I will call such standard (or ‘Roothian’) alternatives, external alternatives.
The main goal of this paper is to examine cases where a focus sensitive expression can also operate on another type of alternatives, which I will call ‘internal’ alternatives. Intuitively, such alternatives are not alternatives to p, but rather alternative interpretational versions of p. That is, with internal alternatives, the focused element is not replaced by a distinct element (of the same semantic type), but rather with an identical element with a distinct interpretation. Thus, the overt material in p and the propositions in the set of internal alternatives is identical, and the difference only lies in the interpretation given to covert material in p.
More formally, I will propose that in the case of ‘internal’ altenatives the alternatives to the prejacnet are derived by assigning a covert variable in the focused element a distinct value. Depending on the semantics of the associate, this covert variable can be a standard variable (with gradable expressions), a covert quantifier, a domain restriction variable, a precision standard variable, etc. 
The main operator I will analyze in this respect is the Hebrew 'bixlal' (cf. Migron 2003, Greenberg & Khrizman 2012). I will claim that it is an 'even-like operator, which unlike the standard 'even' (and the Hebrew 'afilu') can operate on such 'internal alternatives.

The study explores the grammatical means employed for the expression of information structure in standard colloquial Burmese on the basis of a corpus of written and spoken texts. It analyses the morphosyntactic and prosodic devices identified as relevant for its goals, namely the differential subject and object marking, constituent order, particles used to create a range of interpretations related to the notions of topic, focus and contrast, stand-alone sentence nominalisations and prosody.
The study argues for the existence of a grammatical system of informational PACKAGING in Burmese that has no direct linking to information structural categories like topic, focus and contrast. Expressed by various morphosyntactic means, it segregates information into separate informational units (PACKAGES) and establishes structural relations between them. This partition shows a robust correspondence to prosody.
The PACKAGING system is mobilised for creation of diverse information structure-related interpretive effects through its different configurations and interaction with the context. Concepts like topic, focus, contrast and apparent contrast-degrees observed in Burmese are interpretive outcomes of this interaction and have no immediate expression in the language. Furthermore, the usage of PACKAGING is not restricted to information structural effects and the system plays a crucial role in discourse structuring and content management in Burmese.
Analysis of stand-alone nominalised sentences along the lines of a speaker’s subjective channel of communication suggests the resemblance with the function of similar phenomena in many other Tibeto-Burman languages. It proposes PACKAGING motivations for this function and shows how this can be mobilised for information structure-related interpretations.
Hence, the study rejects the view of a direct expression of information structural categories by linguistic means. Instead, similarly to many other linguistic categories, it proposes an indirect interpretive link between a pragmatically-semantically underspecified grammatical system and the derived interpretation.

Colouring Meaning. Collocation and connotation in figurative language by Gill Philip SCL focuses on the use of corpora throughout language study, the development of a quantitative approach to linguistics, the design and use of new tools for processing language texts, and the theoretical implications of a data-rich discipline.

In an agglutinative system as it is in Turkish language, whatever the subject of the study is, morphologic and syntaxic viewpoint can't be ignored. We must take into consideration morphosyntax and consider it as a starting-point of our linguistic research. In this paper, we will study some structural particularities of modern Turkish spoken as mother tongue. These structural particularities concern two principal domains of the contemporary linguistic: intonation and enunciation.

El domingo 20 de noviembre de 2011 señalaría un antes y un después en
la dirección política de España por aquel entonces aún impredecible. Un
penúltimo domingo de otoño marcó la elección del Partido Popular como la
última que se disputarían Partido Popular y Partido Socialista Obrero Español bajo la denominación de ‘bipartidismo’ o como ya entonces muchos
acuñaban ‘PPSOE’.
Quizá no fuera esa, sino el 25 de mayo de 2014, con motivo de las elecciones al Parlamento Europeo la fecha en la que el sistema bipartidista, vigente desde 1982, se resquebrajó.
En tal contexto, nuevos conjuntos políticos irrumpen en escena, bajo el
pretexto de buscar “el empoderamiento de la gente para que no robasen la
democracia” (Iglesias, 2014). Partidos emergentes como Ciudadanos y sus lí-
deres, pero más concretamente Podemos, es decir, Pablo Iglesias —objeto de
este estudio—, son los encargados de capitanear el ‘cambio’ a través del arma
más importante: una nueva retórica.

Many linguistic expressions are constructed around colour words: ‘see red’, ‘green with envy’, ‘whiter than white’. They appear to confirm the existence of connotative meanings,
and are often cited in commentaries regarding connotative meaning. But to what extent does the functional linguistic use of these expressions correspond to their etymology? This study examines such colour-word expressions using authentic, naturally-occurring data drawn from general reference corpora in English and Italian.
The corpus evidence turns theoretical linguistic description on its head. Those expressions that are said to prove the existence of connotative meanings do nothing of the sort. In communicative acts, they are chosen for their pragmatic value, not their compositional semantic content, and display the unmistakable signs of delexicalisation. However, connotative meaning does find its way into language in use: it abounds in the many and various innovative expressions based upon those delexicalised canonical forms.
It is in translation that the full implications of delexicalisation and relexicalisation come to the fore. The realisation that conventional language is essentially delexicalised encourages the translator to work mainly with pragmatic, functional meaning. This prioritises the translation of meaning over word-form, resulting in a more faithful transmission of semantic content from one language to another.

This chapter develops a relevance-theoretic model – building on and refining the ideas of Wilson and Sperber (1979), Sperber and Wilson (1995), and Breheny (1998) – of how one aspect of intonation, the position of sentence stress, affects the incremental processing of simple utterances in English. After proposing a notation (adapted from Wedgwood, 2005) for modeling how cognitive effects may be derived from not-yet-fully-decoded utterances, the chapter advances the central tenet that the position of sentence stress should be seen as marking a particular stage in the hearer's incremental processing, encouraging the investment of effort in deriving cognitive effects at that stage. It sketches how this approach compares against other work within Relevance Theory, including efforts to analyze intonational contours or tones themselves in terms of procedural meaning, and it concludes, contra Breheny (1998), that although the position of sentence stress has an impact on the procedures of utterance comprehension, it is not best viewed as constituting a type of “procedural meaning” per se.

The paper looks into the characteristics of teenage discourse based on the main characters of two authors, British and American, who work in the field of bibliotherapy (the fictional text provides healing by means of reading; that is, inspiring young people to overcome difficulties). We examine the genre and stylistic features of a teenage discourse, such as lexical, semantic, phonetic and graphic characteristics of the rural British English, the Northern English dialect depicted in the language of a male teenager in THE TRUE TALE OF THE MONSTER BILLY DEAN by David Almond. In this novel the thematic component is represented by the following recurrent concepts or frames: EDUCATION, NATURE OF THE "SELF", COMING OF AGE, ADAPTATION TO CHANGE, RELATIONS BETWEEN OPPOSITES (LIFE AND DEATH, PAST AND FUTURE, REALITY AND FICTION). The expressive lexis, for example, metaphors, teenage slang and collo-quialisms, illustrate youth in crisis and the challenges of growing up. The other novel we analyze is CHASING REDBIRD by Sharon Creech; here we examine the discourse features of a female teenager, including the thematic components of Themes such as FAMILY, OVERCOMING DEPRESSION, and TEENAGE ROMANCE. The analysis of the conversations of fictional characters created by British and American authors is used to build generalizations about the characteristics of language and style of teenagers. The stylistic and genre components highlight the colloquial style used to depict the personal life of a male and female teenagers , who confront the evils of society, including corruption, unkindness, and family issues.

This paper aims to investigate the use of time-related features of talk in evoking (im)politeness in Roman Comedy. To this end, I use evidence from the scansion of the text to identify syllable shortenings and accumulations of heavy (slow-pacing) tokens, as well as rhythmical patterns within utterances pronounced in socially charged situations. Moreover, the (im)polite value is associated with the meticulously timed delivery of speech acts (e.g., mocking threats) with particular focus on the
culture-specific use of religious formulae. As a result, the paper tentatively presents some methods of recovering prosodic cues for verbal interaction, represented in the comedy text.

This article presents a comprehensive linguistic analysis of intonation with a systematic identification of the most important functions and features of the phonetic design of this phenomenon based on the American film "Clueless". Due to the fact that the action of the film takes place at school and touches upon the problem of social groups among young people, the characters' speech is filled with jargon and speech phenomena accompanying intonation (in particular, Vocal Fry, a discursive marker like), and demonstrates the use of this intonation. It is important to note that the index or personal-social function of intonation is of the greatest value in this study, i.e. "The ability of intonation to identify the speaker's personality".

Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Burmese is usually analysed as directly related to the expression of information structure. Yet, this corpus-based study of DOM and the associated prosody finds that DOM is not based on information structure alone, but is also additionally motivated by discourse structure and content management.
The suggested analysis proposes that DOM in Burmese provides a grammatical structure of information PACKAGING: a system of separating information into units (PACKAGES) and establishing relations between them. Different configurations of PACKAGING are employed to create an array of context-dependent interpretive effects related to information structure, discourse structure and other factors. Hence, it is argued that information structure is not directly expressed in the language. Instead, it stems from an interpretation of the interplay between information PACKAGING and various pragmatic-semantic factors, and is but one of the possible effects created by PACKAGING.

De Vries' (2006 et seq.) addition of 'par-Merge' to the extant Merger operations utilized by the narrow syntax provides a means by which to model parataxis and yet maintain that paratactic constituents (i.e. parentheticals) are concatenated with their host in the narrow syntax in the structural position in which they are observed. A principal ingredient of the par-Merge approach to parataxis is the functional head Par, which triggers par-Merge. While Par is often morphologically realized as a coordinator in English, in certain parentheticals it is never realized. Its absence lends credence to par-Merge's alternatives, which demand that parataxis be modelled semantically rather than syntactically. In this paper, we provide indirect support for the par-Merge approach by demonstrating that, in the Turkish counterparts to those English parentheticals that never realize Par, Par is realized as the lexeme ki. If ki is indeed Par's realization in Turkish, one may stipulate that Par's morphological absence in certain English constructions does not indicate that par-Merge must be discarded or even that its universality for modelling parataxis must be diminishedits absence indicates only that some language-specific constraint prevents Par's realization in certain English parentheticals.

Manuel Jobert and Sandrine Sorlin’s collection of articles started off as a tribute to Geoffrey Leech, who was among the first to connect irony and banter in his 1983 Principles of Pragmatics and later in his 2014 Pragmatics of Politeness. But as Jobert and Sorlin make it clear in their introduction, the book soon took off in another direction, as not every researcher in the field considers it helpful to analyse both notions conjointly. The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter then mainly tackles the issue of irony, while three articles (and the introduction) address the issue of banter, either for its own sake or in conjunction with irony. The collection of articles, published in the John Benjamins’ “Linguistic Approaches to Literature” series, is not, however, just another book on irony, as its focus is not so much on how irony (or banter) is processed, but rather on its (their) discursive function(s).
More: http://www.cercles.com/review/r84/Jobert.html

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.

This study investigates the syntax-prosody mapping of parentheticals. The results of a production experiment on Turkish demonstrate that the parentheticals bence 'for me' and yanılmıyorsam 'if I am not wrong' are parsed as identical to subclausal arguments, i.e. as phonological phrases when pre-nuclear and parts of phonological phrases when post-nuclear. These results are discussed with respect to a larger data set, in which the prosodic category types of phrasal and clausal parentheticals are compared. Taken together, the data show that parentheticals that are used to commit speech acts, regardless of whether they are clausal or not, are always parsed as intonational phrases, whereas, other parentheticals are parsed as phonological phrases. The paper concludes that illocutionary force projection is the only trigger for intonational phrase formation regardless of whether or not the input syntactic structure is parenthetical, clausal or subclausal.

Although the Ancients placed great emphasis on delivery, modern rhetorical scholars often overlook the oral dimensions of speech. Speech is powerful because of its ability to elicit a somatic response. Scholars in other disciplines are examining how speech affects the body, but contemporary rhetorical scholarship often overlooks their findings. This essay reviews scholarship both inside and outside of communication studies that demonstrates the interplay between rhetoric and orality, paying particular attention to how scientific scholarship can inform our conception of ethos and pathos. By drawing together scientific and rhetorical scholarship, scholars in all disciplines can gain a greater understanding of how speech affects the mind, body, and soul.

The purpose of this study is twofold: while (i) describing embedded content questions in Turkish Sign Language (TİD), (ii) it aims to explain why and how TİD distinguishes between wh-complements embedded under different types of verbs. Embedded questions comprise a broad area of research in any language. This study, however, will give the center stage to the description of the syntactic and prosodic properties of wh-complements embedded under two semantically distinct environments: verbs of retaining knowledge such as know, remember and forget, and inquisitive verbs such as ask, wonder and investigate (Karttunen 1977), while discussing the theoretical implications of the differences. Two central findings of my inquiry are that (i) the syntactic distribution of wh-items in embedded content questions differs from the syntactic distribution of wh-items in simplex questions (for the latter see Makaroğlu 2012, İşsever & Makaroğlu 2013, and Göksel & Kelepir 2013), and (ii) the relationship that holds between an inquisitive verb and its wh-complement is not the same as the relationship between a verb of retaining knowledge and its wh-complement. This will become apparent by two crucial findings: (a) the presence of a specific non-manual marker in the former verb type, associated with the clause-typing of content questions in TİD (Göksel & Kelepir 2013), as opposed to the absence of it in the latter, and (b) the preferred position of wh-complements with respect to different types of matrix verbs. After a thorough examination, we shall see that both complement types obey the same embedded clause-internal syntactic restrictions while they differ from each other with respect to their position in the matrix clause and their prosodic properties. Although throughout the literature there is a tendency to study the [+wh] complements of all types of embedding verbs uniformly, this study highlights the necessity to further classify these wh-complements depending on the type of the matrix verb that they are embedded under.

Although many pay lip-service to the view that signs are common to culture and biology, it remains unclear how such a unity could emerge. Indeed, while those working with culture usually ignore biology, biologists rarely consider how their observations bear on issues of meaning. So, when sign-making is studied, its outcomes are usually interpreted either against a cultural surround or models of how semiosis is represented in the brain. Often it is implied that the only alternative is a biolinguistic view where syntactic computations are used to claim that (internal) language has its basis in molecular biology (Jenkins, 2000). In what follows, I challenge the view that verbal language are, on any such view, entirely separable from persons, neural processes and the sensorium. Building on Eerdmans, Prevignano and Thibault’s (2003) overview of what Gumperz’s opus offers to the ‘theory and practice of communication analysis’ (2003: vii), I consider how to naturalize contextualization cues. I argue that, since much contextualizing is independent of ‘meaning potential’, we can turn to how indexical sense-making is grounded in biosemiosis. Sketching such a model, I link Barbieri’s (2002) approach to semantic coding with Damasio’s (1999) view of core consciousness to show how human judgements can use the feeling-of-what-happens. During talk sensitivity to the feel of biosemiosis prompts us both to adjust to each other in real-time and to make verbal judgements about how they sound and act.

plus précisément sur la possibilité de proposer une approche compositionnelle du sens des contours intonatifs. Après avoir présenté rapidement différentes positions défendues dans la littérature, et après avoir précisé si et dans quelle mesure ces propositions peuvent être dites compositionnelles, nous montrons que ce qui fait la différence entre elles peut se résumer en deux points : (i) quelle place fait-on à la phonologie ? et (ii) quelles sont les dimensions de la signification mises en jeu par l'intonation ? Il apparaît alors qu'on ne peut proposer une analyse compositionnelle du sens de l'intonation que si on abandonne l'idée d'une association directe entre formes et fonctions et qu'on élabore une proposition qui articule, tant en ce qui concerne la phonologie que la sémantique, des niveaux de représentation intermédiaires, mettant en jeu des primitives abstraites. Ce n'est qu'à ce prix qu'on peut analyser les contours et leurs sens et isoler des atomes qui associent une forme et un sens. Dans la dernière partie de l'article, nous élaborons quelques pistes pour une analyse compositionnelle du sens des contours finaux focaux en français qui repose sur deux hypothèses : d'une part qu'on peut distinguer dans les contours la contribution des accents mélodiques et celle des tons de frontière, et d'autre part que les dimensions de la signification mises en jeu par l'intonation ont à voir avec l'interaction. Notre thèse est que les contours du français indiquent le caractère consensuel ou conflictuel du contenu présenté, le degré d'engagement du locuteur sur ce contenu et le fait qu'il prenne en charge ou délègue au contraire à l'interlocuteur la validation de ce contenu. ABSTRACT This paper addresses the issue of the contribution of intonation to the meaning of an utterance, and more precisely of the conditions that should be met to propose a compositional approach to the meaning of intonational contours. After presenting different positions in the literature and specifying if and how much these proposals can be said compositional, we show that their differences can be summarized in two points: (i) what is the place of phonology? (ii) what kinds of meaning are brought into play by intonation? It appears that a compositional approach to intonational meaning is possible only if one gives up the idea of a direct association between form and function and develops a proposal combining intermediate levels of representation with abstract primitives both on the phonological and on the semantic side. Then it becomes possible to analyze the contours and their meaning by defining parts having both form and meaning. The last part of the paper proposes several ideas toward a compositional analysis of the meaning of French tunes based on two hypotheses: (i) it is possible to distinguish between the contributions of pitch accents and those of boundary tones; (ii) intonational meaning is interactional. We claim that French tunes indicate the consensual or contentious aspect of the related content, the degree of speaker commitment and the way the speaker takes on the validation of the content of the utterance or delegates it to the addressee.

It is well known that speakers rely on prosodic and gestural features at the time of producing and understanding verbal irony. Yet little research has examined (a) how gestures manifest themselves in spontaneous speech, both during and after ironic utterances; and (b) how the presence of the so-called ‘gestural codas’ (audiovisual cues produced after the ironic utterance) influences irony detection. In Experiment 1, spontaneously produced verbal irony utterances generated between pairs of friends in conversational dyads were analyzed for semantic, prosodic and visual contrasts. Results show that ironic utterances contrast with immediately preceding non-ironic utterances, both in terms of prosody and gesture. Experiment 2 tested the contribution of the presence vs. absence of such ‘gestural codas’ to the perception of verbal irony. An irony rating task was conducted in which participants were audiovisually presented with a set of ambiguous discourse contexts followed by a set of matching ironic and non-ironic utterances presented in two conditions, namely without coda and with coda. Results show that subjects detected the speaker’s ironic intent significantly better when post-utterance codas were present (88%) than when they were not (56%), thus confirming the hypothesis that visual information produced after ironic sentences is a key factor in the identification of the speaker’s ironic intent.

Invoking turn-taking to explain conversations has long blocked progress in the field. Not only are there no logical or empirical grounds for saying conversation is constructed out of 'turns', but acoustic records show talk to be inseparable from how, in a microtemporal dimension, individuals orchestrate their words. Conversations are dialogical activity irreducible to sequences of forms: phonetic substance matters. Talking of 'turns' obscures the significance of how people act. By subordinating action to word-based patterns, talk comes to be conceptualized independently of timing. In advocating the contrary view that timing is central to talk, the paper highlights pitch matching. Using acoustic measures, persons are shown to orchestrate the pitch of their voices so that interindividual patterns embody the interpersonal sense of events. Observations about timing thus clarify what listeners hear when utterances are spoken in a particular sense.

Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning, and it is well known that prosody -or, more informally, •tone of voice' -can contribute crucially to that meaning. Pragmatic effects in speech are thus the product of both what is said and how it is said, and the two are inextricably linked However, while many working in pragmatics are well aware of the important contnbution of prosody, exactly bow these effects are generated is harder to establish. A number of the ways in which prosody plays a pragmatic role are set out in this volume. It aims to give a cross-section of the many different topics and approaches within the field of prosody and its interface with pragmatics. , in his textbook on pragmatics, acknowledged that the absence of prosody from his account, particularly intonation, was a serious omission, but justified the omission on two grounds: first that there was as yet no agreement on how to analyse intonation, and second that the area was understudied Twenty-five years on, the American autosegmental model, captured in the ToBI transcription system. has become the international standard in intonational phonology (e.g. Ladd, 19%; Gussenhoven, 2004), and for typological comparison (Jun, 2005), but other models still continue to have currency, including variations of the British system ofholistic contours (fall, rise, fall-rise etc.). None, however, accounts sufficiently for all pragmatic effects of prosody_ which also derive from the kind of effects often referred to as paralinguistic.

The present study investigated the perception of phrase-level prosodic prominence in American English, using the Rapid Prosody Transcription (RPT) task. We had two basic goals. First, we sought to examine how listeners' subjective impressions of prominence relate to phonology, defined in terms of Autosegmental-Metrical distinctions in (a) pitch accent status and (b) pitch accent type. Second, and in line with this special issue, we sought to explore how phonology might mediate the effects of other cues to prominence, both signal-based (acoustic) and signal-extrinsic (stimulus and listener properties) in nature. Findings from a large-scale RPT experiment (N=158) show prominence perception in this task to vary significantly as a function of phonology; a word's perceived prominence is significantly dependent on its accent status (unaccented, prenuclear accented, or nuclear accented) and to a slightly lesser extent, to pitch accent type (L*, !H*, H*, or L+H*). In addition, the effects of other known cues to prominence-both signal-based acoustic factors as well as more "top-down" signal-extrinsic factors-were found to vary systematically depending on accent status and accent type. Taken together, the results of the present study provide further evidence for the complex nature of prominence perception, with implications for our knowledge of prosody perception and for the use of tasks like RPT as a method for crowdsourcing prosodic annotation.

The study of semantic prosody is new to the corpus linguistic field. It has become apparent through the current research that semantic prosody be integrated into English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) vocabulary learning, reading, writing and teaching. Semantic prosody, when taught explicitly, is valuable to the EFL/ESL teaching field to develop communicative competence among non-native English speakers (NNES). The different positive and negative connotations of specific words and their impact on NNES bilingual dictionaries are examined along with its effects on NNES written works. These findings give new insights into the teaching of semantic prosody. The results of the study suggest that if explicit instruction of semantic prosodic words and phrases in EFL/ESL vocabulary classes do not occur, then the results are a misuse of semantic prosodic words and phrases by NNES. Practical suggestions for EFL/ESL teaching of semantic prosody are provided.

Cette thèse porte sur la contextualisation du discours radiophonique par des moyens prosodiques. Plus précisément, le travail est focalisé sur sept « figures marquées » consistant en des variations saillantes d’un ou de plusieurs paramètres prosodiques. Ces phénomènes sont envisagés ici aussi bien du point de vue de leurs formes acoustiques que du point de vue de leurs contextes d’occurrences et fonctions discursives caractéristiques. Le corpus étudié consiste en six émissions radiophoniques dans lesquelles on entend parler cinq grands philosophes français du XXe siècle : Gaston Bachelard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty et Jean-Paul Sartre. Les émissions ont été transmises par différentes stations françaises entre 1948 et 1973. La durée totale du corpus étudié est de 162’32. 

En plus de la présentation générale des phénomènes étudiés, cette thèse  comprend des parties contrastives dans lesquelles les deux phénomènes principaux du travail (la figure dite HB et la figure dite ondulatoire) sont comparés à un contour mélodique de musique classique pour piano et à une figure prosodique du finnois (la figure dite de familiarité). De plus, une partie de la thèse est consacrée à une étude contrastive portant sur l’interprétation prosodique des signes de ponctuation (le point et la virgule) dans L’Étranger d’Albert Camus, lu par l’auteur. 

Méthodologiquement, la thèse relève principalement de l’analyse conversationnelle (CA) et de l’approche interactionnelle de l’étude de la prosodie. Le travail est également inspiré par la « théorie de la contextualisation » de Gumperz et de nombreux travaux linguistiques et phonétiques portant sur la prosodie du français.

Les résultats de ce travail – basé sur sept publications originales – suggèrent que les « figures marquées » constituent des phénomènes multidimensionnels jouant un rôle complexe dans la contextualisation du discours radiophonique. Les formes acoustiques de ces phénomènes sont très variables et leurs fonctions se répartissent sur plusieurs niveaux discursifs. En plus de la présentation des phénomènes étudiés, la thèse comporte des réflexions méthodologiques et théoriques concernant l’étude et la nature du processus de la contextualisation de la parole.

This paper outlines a relevance-theoretic approach to ‘thetic’ sentences (all-new, subject-stressed sentences) such as my CAR broke down or JOHN arrived, building on Sperber & Wilson (1995 – hereinafter S&W), Breheny (1996, 1998), and Sax (2010). It claims that a number of the distinctive traits of thetic sentences in English may be productively explained in terms of the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure and the impact of early focal stress placement on dynamic processing. One conclusion is that the ‘out of the blue’ view of thetic sentences widely assumed in the information-structure literature is misleading; instead, a processing constraint introduced by what I call an ‘expectation for an explanation’ is found to be more explanatory.

This study investigates the prosody of different types of sentence-medial parentheticals in Turkish. The results of a production experiment show that clausal parentheticals exhibit cues similar to intonation phrase-level cues such as pre-boundary lengthening of the final syllable, longer pauses, and higher final rise. Phrasal parentheticals, on the other hand, exhibit cues similar to phonological phrase-level cues on both edges. From these results, we conclude that clausal parentheticals are prosodically isolated; supporting the theories of syntax-prosody mapping, while XP parentheticals are prosodically integrated, partially supporting syntax-prosody mapping theories. The latter result supports theories that assume XP-to-phonological phrase matching, but not those that predict the prosodic isolation with all parentheticals. In this respect, Turkish marks constituent-to-constituent matching of syntax and prosody more faithfully than the mapping of syntactic isolation. Additionally, mapping of pragmatic information is highly favoured in Turkish. Specifically, pragmatically isolated parentheticals such as vocatives or interjections are prosodically isolated, regardless of their syntactic make-up. We discuss the prosodic structure of Turkish parentheticals and propose a representation that favours the recursion of certain prosodic category types.

Rhetorical questions are in many respects both question-like and assertion-like, and have been analyzed either as questions or assertions. Building on Farkas and Roelofsen (2017), we propose a unified account of rhetorical and information-seeking wh-questions in inquisitive semantics, where we are no longer forced to choose between these labels. Rhetorical questions that suggest that the answer is the empty set ('nobody' to a question with who) are compared to ones that suggest a non-empty set as their answer. We assign the same basic conventional discourse effects to the two types of rhetorical questions as for information-seeking questions, but posit different special discourse effects, which signal differences in speaker commitment. Special effects are signaled by a marked form, such as by a non-canonical intonation. We argue that the prosodic marking of Mandarin wh-interrogatives, whether used as a genuine or rhetorical question, is consistent with our analysis.

A remark such as “The party was really funny!” can be interpreted literally, as a praise, or ironically, as a criticism. To avoid  misunderstandings, the ironist can pronounce the comment with a  particular intonational contour, the so called ironic tone of voice, and accompany it with specific facial expressions. Also in Italian Sign Language (LIS) nonmanual markers can signal the ironic intent of the signer, and thus facilitate the detection of the intended meaning.
We report the results of two experimental studies that aim at identifying the role played by purely visual cues in the detection of irony in spoken Italian, and at verifying whether ironic remarks in LIS are recognizable also by those who are not competent in that language. We discuss the findings in the light of the debate concerning the affective or grammatical status of facial expressions, in spoken and signed  languages

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.

espanolLa prosodia juega un papel importante en la diferenciacion pragmatica de los enunciados, sin embargo, ha sido un aspecto poco explorado a pesar de las recientes investigaciones en el area. En este articulo se presentan las caracteristicas prosodicas que permiten diferenciar entre mandatos y ruegos en datos de lectura y de habla dirigida recolectados con una lista de enunciados y un cuestionario de roles. El analisis prosodico se enmarca en el modelo Metrico Autosegmental (AM), se utiliza como sistema de etiquetaje el Spanish Tones and Break Indices (Sp-ToBI) y como herramienta para el analisis el programa Praat. Los resultados permiten reconocer claramente la prosodia de los mandatos y ruegos tanto en los enunciados conformados por una palabra como con enunciados mas complejos. En ambos casos el componente prosodico apunta a identificar los mandatos a partir de un tono nuclear L+iH* con final descendente L%, aunado a una reduccion en la duracion silabica y a mayor amplitud en...

The Implicit Prosody Hypothesis (Fodor 1998, 2002) states that attachment of a relative clause (RC) in a sentence with a complex noun phrase is influenced by a default prosodic contour of the structure projected in silent reading. It predicts that speakers of a language who prefer high attachment (i.e., RC modifies the head of a complex NP) would produce a prosodic break between the RC and the adjacent NP. This study investigates the validity of the IPH in production and perception experiments on Japanese data. Results show that a majority of Japanese speakers produce a prosodic break between the RC and the adjacent noun and prefer high attachment. The correlation between default phrasing and attachment interpretation supports the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis.