ICLCE 3, Institute of English Studies, University of London, July 2009 Understanding English Intonation Billy Clark Tim Wharton

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Looking at intonational meaning is part of our wider goal of trying to develop an account of how linguistic and non-linguistic behaviours interact in the interpretation of utterances. This will include: Discussion of a range of behaviours – from the linguistic to facial expression, gesture, prosody (to the extent that this is not part of language) An account of how such behaviours communicate (how they are interpreted) and what they convey

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions In this talk we: Introduce some of the theoretical distinctions we propose to use in our attempt to develop an account of intonational meaning in general. Begin to develop an account of intonational meaning in a particular language, English.

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions The questions we need to answer include: a)What kind of thing is intonational meaning? (‘linguistic’? ‘pragmatic’? ‘arbitrary’? ‘iconic’? ‘natural’? ‘non-natural’?) b)What do intonational meanings convey and how are they understood?

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Turning first to question (a): our approach to understanding intonational meaning is based on Wilson and Wharton’s (2006) discussion of prosody. They suggest that there are three varieties of prosodic meaning: Prosodic inputs ‘Natural’ Linguistic Signs Signals Coding (plus inference)CodingInference

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions ‘Natural’ meaning is understood, following Grice (1957), as meaning which arises when a phenomenon is understood as providing evidence for a particular conclusion (the classic example being where smoke ‘means’ fire). The distinction between natural signs and natural signals is based on a distinction made by Hauser (1996) in looking at animal communication.

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Natural signs: are not inherently communicative (this is not their main function) and are understood by inference. Natural signals: are inherently communicative (this is their main function) and are understood by a process of decoding. e.g. chimpanzee nests provide evidence (to forest monkeys) of the presence of chimpanzees but they are not built in order to communicate this (they would still build them even if there were no forest monkeys to interpret this evidence) e.g. honeybee dances provide information about the location of nectar (there is no reason to assume the dances would exist if they did not have this communicative function)

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Wharton (2003, 2009) illustrates the sign-signal distinction in human behaviour by considering shivering and smiling. Shivering might provide evidence that someone is cold but its main function is to provide heat through rapid muscle movement. Smiling, on the other hand, seems to have evolved to fulfil a communicative function. Wilson and Wharton claim that there are prosodic inputs which count as examples of natural signs and natural signals, as well as linguistic prosodic inputs.

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions To summarise, then, there are three types of prosodic inputs: Natural signs: (comparable to shivering) provide evidence for inference but are not designed to be communicative, e.g. prosody affected by tiredness, nervousness, drunkenness, etc. Natural signals: (comparable to smiling) reveal information via innately determined interpretive codes, e.g. affective tones of voice Linguistic prosody: (comparable to other linguistic expressions) provide coded information which is the starting point for inferential interpretation

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions What do intonational meanings convey and how are they interpreted? Natural signs are interpreted by inference. Many behaviours, linguistic or otherwise, are interpreted without the need for any code.

Consider the wholly pragmatic explanations of the different interpretations of these two utterances: ‘My childhood days are gone’ ‘My childhood days are gone gone’ Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions The second example does not encode more semantic information than the first example but the extra effort involved guarantees that the addressee will be rewarded by looking for extra effects.

How might this work in the case of prosody? Compare the effects on reference assignment of the ‘neutral’ stress pattern in (a) and the costlier contrastive pattern in (b): Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions (a)Billy insulted Tim and then he hit him. (b)Billy insulted Tim and then hé hit hím. The speaker of (b) does not encode more semantic information than if she utters (a). However, use of the non-default stress pattern (or anything costlier to process) in (b) should divert the hearer from this otherwise preferred interpretation (in which Billy hit Tim) towards an alternative, less accessible interpretation on which he refers to Tim and him to Billy.

Encoded meanings: Natural signals and linguistic prosodic inputs encode ‘procedural’ meaning – ( see Vandepitte 1989; Clark and Lindsey 1990; House 1990, 2006, 2007; Escandell-Vidal 1998, 2002; Imai 1998; Fretheim 2002; Wilson and Wharton 2006; Clark 2007; Wharton 2009) Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions

Simplifying for today, conceptual meaning involves encoding concepts which then figure in logical forms of utterances in which they occur, e.g. the word conference encodes the concept {CONFERENCE} so that a version of this concept occurs in representations derived from the following utterance which occurred in a recent ‘I’m at a conference from the 14th to the 17th of July’ Concepts and procedures:

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Concepts and procedures: Still simplifying, procedural meaning involves encoding something which guides the hearer in the processing and interpretation of an utterance, and does not figure in its logical form: e.g. in the utterance below (from another , reporting on a practice conference presentation), the word ‘so’ encodes a procedure which leads the hearer to treat the proposition it introduces as a conclusion inferred by a process which takes an earlier proposition as a premise: ‘On the actual talk, the main thing was that (as I knew) I had far more than I could have hoped to get through in the time. So the main job now is to think about exactly what's vital in the 20 minutes.’

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Today we’re presenting a proposal for some tones (fall, rise, rise-fall, fall-rise, level) of a variety of ‘Southern British English’ (based on, and adapted from, Clark 2007). For now, we’re ignoring variation and ignoring both the fact that there are a range of different ways of realising each of the different tones and the effects of different nucleus placements. We are currently gathering data which we will use to test and develop these proposals.

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Considerations in developing these included the aim of preserving some existing assumptions: That falls seem to be ‘default’ tones, in some sense That intonational meaning is often felt to have a large ‘pragmatic’ component (or to be ‘natural’ in some sense) That propositions communicated by utterances can be either ‘explicatures’ (inferred developments of encoded semantic representations) or ‘implicatures’ (inferred conclusions derived by taking explicatures as input) At each stage we proposed as little linguistic encoding as we felt was needed in order to help account for the interpretation of utterances with the tone we were looking at.

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Here we present the proposed analysis of each tone and the thinking behind it: There is a sense in which this is a ‘default’ tone (in this variety of English) since all utterances could be understood either as descriptions or interpretations like this. FALL: The main explicature is entertained as either a description of a state of affairs or as an interpretation of a thought of someone other than the speaker at the time of utterance.

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions RISE: An explicature of the utterance is entertained as an interpretation of a thought not entertained by the speaker at the time of utterance. This encodes something quite specific but only about one explicature of the utterance and so this is consistent with a wide range of interpretations (including some that seem very similar to what is possible for falls).

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions RISE-FALL: The main explicature is entertained as either a description of a state of affairs or as an interpretation of a thought of someone other than the speaker at the time of utterance AND an explicature of the utterance is considered more relevant than expected (in particular, more relevant than would have been communicated by a fall without the rise). This suggests that the difference between the rise-fall tone and an ‘ordinary’ fall is similar to what would follow from other increases in effort (this is close to what might be understood as a ‘pragmatic explanation’).

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions FALL-RISE: The main explicature is entertained as either a description of a state of affairs or as an interpretation of a thought of someone other than the speaker at the time of utterance AND an explicature of the utterance is entertained as an interpretation of a thought not entertained by the speaker at the time of utterance. This sees fall-rise as amounting roughly to what might have been compositionally derived from the combination of a fall and a rise.

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions LEVEL: This utterance is not yet complete. Our initial proposal here is to treat level tones as a departure from the default fall such that the implication is that the utterance is not yet finished (also implicating that the speaker is not yet ready to give up the floor).

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Here is a very brief indication of how the proposed analyses would lead to different interpretations of the utterance: ‘We’re all going to die’ We will assume in each case that the addressee infers that the referent of we is ‘all members of the human race’ or ‘all human beings’ and that the time at which death will occur is not very precise, roughly equivalent to ‘at some future point’.

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Interpreting ‘We’re all going to die’ With a FALL, this is the default tone and so is consistent with any of a wide range of interpretations including: ‘The speaker is communicating her belief that all human beings will die at some future point’ ‘The speaker is attributing to the hearer the assumption that all human beings will die at some future point’ ‘The speaker is asking whether the hearer believes that all human beings will die at some future point’

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Interpreting ‘We’re all going to die’ With a RISE, one explicature of the utterance is an interpretation of a thought not entertained by the hearer. This is consistent with any of a wide range of interpretations including: ‘The speaker is asking whether the hearer believes that all human beings are going to die’ ‘The speaker is asking whether the hearer intended to communicate that all human beings are going to die’ ‘The speaker is communicating her own belief that all human beings are going to die and would like to be able to think that the hearer has heard and understood this’

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Interpreting ‘We’re all going to die’ With a RISE-FALL, this is the default tone with the added assumption that an explicature of the utterance is considered more relevant than expected (in particular, more relevant than would have been communicated by a fall without the rise). This is consistent with any of a wide range of interpretations including: ‘The speaker is communicating her belief that it is surprising that all human beings are going to die at some future point’ ‘The speaker is ironically distancing herself from the belief that it is extremely surprising that all human beings are going to die at some future point’

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Interpreting ‘We’re all going to die’ With a FALL-RISE, this is the default tone with the added assumption that an explicature of the utterance is entertained as an interpretation of a thought not entertained by the speaker at the time of utterance. This is consistent with any of a wide range of interpretations including: ‘The speaker is communicating her belief that all human beings are going to die and attributes to the hearer an interpretation of this which she does not agree with’ ‘The speaker is communicating her belief that all human beings are going to die and is dissociating herself from one way of understanding this’

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions Interpreting ‘We’re all going to die’ With a LEVEL tone, no other tone has been used and so none of the other analyses has been encoded yet. The only thing that is clear is that this utterance is not yet intonationally complete. This is consistent with any of a wide range of interpretations including: ‘The speaker is communicating her belief that all human beings are going to die and is about to communicate something further’ ‘The speaker is attributing to the hearer the belief that all human beings are going to die and is about to communicate something further’ ‘The speaker is communicating her belief that all human beings are going to die and implicating a lack of interest in this’

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions There is a lot of work to be done in developing and testing analyses in this framework. However: a)The overall framework helps us to develop relatively explicit proposals about the nature of intonational meaning and its role in meaning in general b)This proposal exploits already existing notions within the framework (such as the conceptual-procedural distinction and the explicature-implicature distinction) without requiring extra assumptions c)It suggests reasons for some often discussed intonational phenomena, such as the variability of intonational meanings and the intuition that there is something ‘pragmatic’ or ‘iconic’ about intonation

Introduction - Intonation in general - Intonation in English - Specific utterances - Questions There are still many questions to explore, not least empirical questions about how well the proposal handles existing data and how it might be tested by informant judgements, perceptual experiments, etc. One of the biggest questions for us is: These analyses are consistent with a wide range of interpretations of utterances. Can we show that they make it possible to explain how interpretations are actually inferred in context?

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