Hubert Truckenbrodt (et al.) ZAS Berlin
truckenbrodt@zas.gwz-berlin.de
The first part of this talk is simple, the second part is experimental and builds on joint work.
We first highlight an important result of Bartels 1997 (not among the authors here) that is not fully recognized in the literature. The question, in simple terms:
Why, across languages, is ‘question intonation’ [/] felt to be appropriate in yes- no-questions (Is it raining [/]) but less so in wh-questions (When was it raining [\]) and impossible in alternative questions (Is it raining or isn’t it [\]). Arguments against earlier proposals such as [/] always marking continuation (Is it raining [/]
or isn’t it. Kretschmer 1938) are reviewed. The classical work by Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990 does not address this issue.
The answer, building on Bartels: (a) intonational meanings operate on salient propositions (rather than on the output of compositional semantics) and (b) for a given salient proposition p, [\] commits the speaker S to p while [/] doesn’t.
(Independent evidence will be shown for (a) and (b)). For all question types, a possible salient proposition is the assumption of the existence of an answer, shown in (1). S’s endorsement of the existence of an answer can be marked with [\] in all cases, and correspondingly all kinds of questions can be marked [\].
In the alternative question, this directly generates the ‘no other alternatives’
impact of alternative questions (Do you want tea or coffee[\]–i.e. you want tea or coffee) as opposed to yes/no-questions (Do you want tea or coffee[/]–i.e. perhaps not).
Importantly, now, yes/no-questions are different because there is a further salient proposition available (one not shared by the other question types): In Is it raining? this further salient proposition is It is raining. This of course must not be endorsed by S, else the questioning purpose is undermined. This salient proposition may be chosen and must then be marked by [/]. It will be shown how this account in terms of salient propositions is also compatible with variation observed in the corpus literature.
In the second part of the talk, we present the results of a combined production and perception experiment on Brazilian Portuguese intonation. Six speakers from the Campinas area read three sentences with ante-penultimate stress in five environments. Each environment is constructed to trigger one of five central contours of BP informally illustrated by Cagliari 1982 (see also de Moraes 1998): (a) statement (b) emphatic statement (c) yes/no-question (d) surprise question (e) continuation. In a following perception task, twenty different speakers from the same area matched each production to the best-suited of the five contexts. The productions that were recognized significantly well are acoustically evaluated.
Results for the well-recognized tokens: Emphatic statements and normal statements employ a H+L* L- contour and are distinguished in the phonetic
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height. Yes/no-questions and surprise questions are phonologically distinguished as L+H* L- vs. L*+H L-, see Fig. 1.
A decomposition of the tune meanings allows us to isolate how this intonation system simultaneously encodes two distinctions: (i) what is coded by syntactic inversion in English (declarative vs. interrogative, not syntactically encoded in BP) and (ii) additionally “[\]” (endorsement by S) vs. “[/]” from above. In BP, [/] is an L+H pitch accent and [\] is an H+L pitch accent. Declaratives are marked by a star on L, i.e. ...L*..., interrogative with the star on H, i.e. ...H*.... (This latter converges with the perception studies of de Moraes 1984 on BP.) In combination, H+L* is a declarative with [\], i.e. a statement; L+H* is an interrogative with [/], i.e. a yes/no-question. Importantly, L*+H is a declarative with [/]: The BP ‘surprise question’ turns out to be equivalent of the English declarative question (e.g. It is raining? Gunlogson 2001). This equivalence will be supported by shared restrictions on their use: Like English declarative questions, BP surprise questions are felicitous only where the addressee can be expected to believe the proposition at issue (also ‘confirmation question’).
Examples and figures
p = existence of answer = (1) Is it raining? It is raining or it isn’t raining.
When was it raining? It was raining at some time.
Is it raining or isn’t it raining? It is raining or it isn’t raining (alternative q.)
Yes/no- questions
-0,3 0 0,3 0,6 0,9 1,2
0 200 400 600 800 ms
Surprise questions
-0,3 0 0,3 0,6 0,9 1,2
0 200 400 600 800ms
Figure 1. Plots of the measurements of the tokens that were recognized particularly well in the perception experiment, in the categories yes/no-questions and surprise questions.
The vertical black bars represent the extent of the sentence-final verb of the intransitive stimulus clauses. The vertical grey bars delimit the stressed syllable in the verb. The plots are normalized for F0 and for time (preserving placement of a given point in its temporal segment) and pool the relevant productions of the six speakers.
References
Bartels, Christine (1997). ‘Towards a Compositional Interpretation of English Statement and Question Intonation’, Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts.
Cagliari, Luiz Carlos (1982). ‘Aspector acỳsticos da entoaỗao do portugues brasileiro’, Linguagem oral, linguagem escrita. Série Estudos 8. Faculdades Integradas de Uberaba, 45-59.
de Moraes, Joao Antônio (1984). ‘Recherches sur l’Intonation modale du Portugais Brésilien Parlé à Rio de Janeiro’, Doctoral dissertation, University of Paris III.
--- (1998). ‘Intonation in Brasilian Portuguese’, in Daniel Hirst and Albert Di Cristo (eds.), Intonation systems. A survey of twenty languages. Cambridge: CUP, 179-94.
Gunlogson, Christine (2001). ‘True to form: rising and falling declaratives as questions in English’, Doctoral dissertation, University of California.
Kretschmer, Paul (1938). ‘Der Ursprung des Fragetons & Fragesatzes’, in Ambrogio Ballini et al. (ed.), Scritti in onore di Alfredo Trombetti. Milano: Ulrico Hoepli, 27-50.
Pierrehumbert, Janet and Hirschberg, Julia (1990). ‘The Meaning of Intonational Contours in the Interpretation of Discourse’, in Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha E.
Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication. Cambridge: MIT Press, 271-311.
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The role of pitch height in constraining the inferential space in Catalan