Research Centre for English and Applied LinguisticsUniversity of Cambridge

Prosodic Features in

Pragmatic inference:Intonational Meaning

from Segment to Word Level

BY:Marcos Bracchitta

SECTION I:

1.1 INTRODUCTION:

As Janet Pierrehumbert (1980) suggests in the opening chapter of her famous work on

English Intonation, defining intonational meaning would require substantial

phonological- as well as pragmatic underpinning. A quarter of a century on,

intonational meaning still remains at the centre of an ideological divide. Widespread

research on phonological categorization continues unscathed, yet notwithstanding it

has been increasingly challenged by the emergent advances in functional notions of

pragmatic inference. Prosody has up until today, perhaps never taken such a frontline

position within the intonational meaning debate. Studies from across the world,

nonetheless, have been nurturing the argument from a number of differing views. This

paper shall look at two principal views on intonational meaning.

Firstly, I shall refer to the question of how intonational meaning is understood by the

different ‘schools’. Secondly, I shall formulate a view with regards to the bearing

recent studies in pragmatics are having on intonational meaning. And thirdly, once

intonational meaning has been described within an added context of pragmatic

inferences, I shall argue a case for a comprehensive view of prosody and of

intonational meaning specifically.

Early on in his work, Ladd (1996) alludes to tenets of these approaches as being either

‘impressionistic’ or ‘instrumental’ in nature. Mainly in reference to the ‘theoretical’

and ‘experimental’ approaches surrounding the work of the IPO1, Ladd makes similar 1The Institute for Perception Research (IPO), was set up in Eindhoven to seek a model of Dutch intonation for use in speech synthesis during the sixties.

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references of divergence between the broader issues surrounding F0 contouring,

acoustic correlates, and intonational structures throughout Intonational Phonology.

Very often, the authorship of recent studies will not gratuitously position themselves

at the vanguards of either one of the camps. Their methodology, more often than not,

does this for them. Formalist linguistics will on the whole prefer to associate itself

with the rigours of experimental data and ‘scientific precision’. The functionalist

view, conversely, finds a greater haven in corpus linguistics and prefers to study

phenomena by its ‘use’, not its ‘form’. The value we are assigning this issue within

this discussion, therefore, is not merely to point out that there is in fact an existing

controversy- but that it is increasingly necessary to view most if not all linguistic

phenomena within the theoretical framework. It is often these theoretical assumptions

that give any set of data their true, all encompassing meanings.

There are a number of other features besides intonational meaning that belong to the

family of prosodic properties such as rhythm, stress, and other paralinguistic

elements. Although these shall be referred to tangentially, the focus of this work shall

be on the properties of intonational meaning specifically. Suprasegmental qualities,

however, along with key paralinguistic cues such as loudness, attitude and emotion,

gesture, etc, do resemble more conventional prosodic qualities enough to form

universals and are thus vital to paralinguistic meaning. An utterance conveyed in

anger as opposed to one in moderation would invoke a similar paralinguistic intention

around the world. Approval and non-approval might likewise be related to pitch, and

so on. Needless to say, moreover, that often it is a combination of features that

eventually amounts to the overall meaning of the utterance more than the prominence

of a single one.

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Optimality Theory (McCarthy, 2002; Hayes 1996) has recently surfaced in

phonological debates as one bridging the gap between formalist and functionalist

conceptions. In a paper written for the Milwaukee Conference in 1997, Hayes

suggested that the Optimality principle of markedness could serve as a bridge for the

two contending theoretical frameworks. In Section III of this paper, this issue shall be

incorporated into the analyses looking into other features which form part of the

functionalist/formalist divide.

In summary, this work shall be divided into three core sections: Aspects of

intonational meaning, pragmatics, and the broader theoretical framework into which

the chosen aspect of prosody shall be reintroduced. An underlying tenet of these three

core areas is their interrelationship and this shall be stressed throughout. The drive for

a conclusion shall be one that presses the importance of these disciplines as

interrelated and mutually benefiting each other.

SECTION I

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INTONATIONAL MEANING: What is meant-some characteristic features.

Some key figures in Intonational studies

It has been suggested that intonational phonology has undergone some important

developments within the last few decades. Interestingly, the more the recent the

studies- the more of an interdisciplinary flair they have began assuming. This shall be

the case in point when we look at some pragmatic and syntactic aspects of

phonological theory in Section II of this work. In the earlier days of these studies,

however, agreement of a theoretical framework was by no means commonplace as

even in the work carried out during the 1960´s, there was quite an apparent divide

between the formal and functional positions. Thus, studies by formalists within

intonational phonology were conducted on stress and rhythm by Liberman (1975); on

African tonal systems by Leben (1973), Goldsmith (1976). Shortly afterwards comes

what Ladd denotes as “without doubt the single most influential contribution to

current work on intonational phonology”(Ladd, 1996:3), namely, that of Janet

Pierrehumbert`s PHD thesis “The Phonology and Phonetics of English

intonation”(1980). Despite his unrestricted praise for the work, Ladd recognizes that

Pierrehumbert’s thesis was in fact a development of Liberman’s metrical theory,

coupled with, amongst others, Bruce’s analysis of Swedish word accents (Bruce

1977).

On the functionalist side, intonation was also the concern of influential writers like

Jones (1962), who was essentially concerned with distinguishing the intonation of

statements from question types; O’Connor and Arnold (1959), who along with the

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work of Uldall (1964), were mainly concerned with intonation as a means of

expressing affective or attitudinal meaning; Halliday (1967), whose interest then was

basically concerned with information structure (an area that later become important

for developing pragmatic studies); and Brasil (1978), whose main area was also

pragmatical as he was specifically interested in the use of intonation as a means of

controlling interactive structure by the participants in the conversation. Although not

necessarily in the realm of a functionalist framework, but certainly concerning the

way in which meaning is portrayed through intonation, Brown et al,(1980) carried out

a study of ESE (Edinburgh Scottish English) whose results pointed to the all

important distinction between ‘new’- also referred to as the ‘focus’ or ‘rheme’

information in the utterance and ‘old’ information, which is also referred to as ‘theme’

or ‘topic’. What remains essentially distinct in studies of this nature is that they are

studies of language ‘in use’ rather than those conducted on abstract domains of

language. By 1985, important studies of language in use began converging with some

of the findings from the structuralist camp as was the case of the work on intonational

pragmatics by Ward and Hirschberg (1985) and Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg

(1990).

Interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic studies have in fact become the preferred de

fault genre of modern linguistics. For reasons that might not be of strict concern to us

here, a shift from the study of isolated linguistic phenomena- with little or no

comparative dimensions, to those of authors collaborating internationally on areas

clearly going beyond sub-disciplines, is achieving extensive notoriety. Taking the

case of the syntax-phonology interface, the work of Selkirk (1984) and Steedman

(2000; 2003), are clear examples of this recurrent interdisciplinarity. Other studies

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have brought collaborators from a number of institutions as in the case of

“Preaccentual Pitch and Speaker Attitude in Dutch” (1997) by Esther Grabe, Carlos

Gussenhoven, Judith Haan, Erwin Marsi, and Brechtje Post, from the Max Planck

Institute in Germany, the Centre for Language Studies in Nijmegen and Tilburg.

Similarly, “Language-Specificity in the Perception of Paralinguistic Intonational

Meaning” (2004) exemplifies another collaboration between Carlos Gussenhoven,

Aoju Chen, and Toni Rietveld all coming from Queen Mary University in London,

the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and Radboud University in Nijegen, respectively.

We shall nevertheless return to the more important question of how these studies

actually contributed to a better understanding of intonation in the discussion on

intonational issues to follow. The list of authors that have researched intonation in

detail is extensive and it is of little use here to run through each of their ideas in detail.

There seems to be, thankfully so, abundant literature on intonation nowadays which

has covered varying aspects of this topic, be it sequential, prosodic, or paralinguistic

in nature.

Developing new ideas on Intonational Meaning

But even a more extensive look at the literature surrounding intonation and on both

sides of the Atlantic, does not shed a great deal of light on what intonational meaning

really is. Be it Pike’s ‘pitch phonemes’ theory (Pike 1945), or its later development in

Trager and Smith (1951), or its criticism in Bolinger (1951); or earlier work on ‘tone

units’ in England by Palmer (1924) and its later development by Kingdon (1958); be

it Crystal’s work on natural spontaneous speech (Crystal 1962), or Cruttenden’s more

recent work on theory (Cruttenden (1997), Ladd’s own directions on pitch (Ladd

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1966), these all seem to be much more courageous on categorizations and ‘atomic

detail’, than they might otherwise be on the general conceptions of intonational

meaning.

It has always been my opinion that Chomsky’s greatest error is not in his finite

methodological detail, but in his general inquisitive direction. Chomsky, that is, and

the entire school of thought that has developed around him in which the world is

viewed from the atom outwards. There must surely be a flaw in attempting to explain

the universe via the premise of the behaviour of the atom? He (and others) will

constantly hit unexplainable boundaries when their particularities cease to counter for

their generalities. The different stages in generative thinking are well known and so is

their constant need of upgrading and reformation in the light of newly accounted

discoveries. Generativism’s entire approach is as risky as attempting to explain the

general behaviour of humanity via the sole behaviour of one individual. The

difference in these logical strategies has for some linguistic criteria, at least, been

referred to as ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ approaches. The point to bear here is that such

differing methodologies not only affect ultimate constructions of form and function,

but have direct relevance to the view on intonational meaning which to some is a

‘particular’ phenomenon, whilst to others is a ‘broad’ one.

The question of whether we should consider intonational meaning as a self-sustaining

phenomenon or one that may be construed by a juxtaposition of other parts or units

was taken up by work by Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg in 1990. In it, they suggest

that the components of a tune are- pitch accents, phrase accents, and boundary tones

and that these in turn are interpreted with respect to their distinct phonological

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domains (1990:286). They did thus refer to this notion as a ‘compositional’ approach

to tune meaning stating that pitch accents, “convey information about the status of the

individual discourse referents, modifiers, predicates, and relationships specified by the

lexical items with which the accents are associated”(1990:286). In similar fashion,

phrase accents denote “the degree of relatedness of one [intermediate] phrase to

preceding and succeeding intermediate phrases…if a phrase ends in a H phrase

accent, for example, it is more likely to be interpreted as a unit with a phrase that

follows”(1990:287). Boundary tones, therefore, “contribute information about the

intonational phrase as a whole”(1990:287). As Ladd himself suggests, however, these

views may not be entirely innovative as they may in effect be responses to his own

work in conjunction with Gussenhoven.(Ladd, 1996:101), in a paper in which they

argue that a similarity in meaning should be reflected by a similarity in phonological

representation. Although Ladd acknowledges differences between the Hirschberg-

Pierrehumbert and Ladd-Gussenhoven approaches to the ‘Linguist’s Theory of

Intonational Meaning’2, he identifies the cause of the difference in the lack of

knowledge on pragmatic inference.

The basic importance of the above is the notion of compositionality of intonational

meaning as seen by Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg. Even though it has sparked and

inspired relevant subsequent work on the matter, I believe it does not necessarily go a

great deal further than Ladd’s on work. The problem remains, however, that

particularly for those like Ladd and others seeking answers in the form (often with

surprisingly functionalist conclusions), the focus of research remains on the behaviour

of ‘atomic’ rather than ‘systemic’ considerations. Intonational meaning, as have thus

2 Ladd refers to his own earlier work on intonational meaning (Ladd 1987a:638), in which proposes that the elements of intonation have meanings themselves. He describes these meanings as being very general but part of a system with ‘rich interpretive pragmatics’.

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far its attempted explanations manifested, has been conceived as a sum of all its parts.

Be they tone units, phrases or boundaries, too much effort has been assigned to

uncovering the categories of the segment and thereon. This type of work sheds

undoubtedly interesting results, and a series of very exciting experiments have been

devised around it, but too much scientific credit has been given to studies of the

segment (or of isolated phonetic and phonological detail), without sufficient spanning

into overriding phenomena.

The deconstruction of any system in other words, is, although exciting, is a risky

general strategy to the understanding of any given phenomena. But to posit an

approach as its best preferred under the terms here described, poses a further

challenge. It is far simpler, in other words, to isolate (a) detail, conduct an experiment

on it, derive a conclusion, and then throw it back into the system, than to take on the

system itself with a number of phenomena occurring simultaneously in opposing

directions and at different speeds. Relativity, is after all, the perception of the

functions of one system within another. Likewise, if the nature of intonational

meaning was really to be guessed at via the explanation of the behaviour of a pre-

head, a head, a tonic syllable, a tail, a pause, a tone-unit boundary, the width of a pitch

range, a pitch key, the loudness, the speed of speech, the voice quality, a fall, a rise, a

fall-rise, rise-fall, etc, all pre-decontextualized before being analyzed and

experimented on, then the real picture might not be similar to that of these elements as

working within a system and alongside one another.

The Chomskian dilemma of trying to find the universe in the atom, in other words,

appears to be common ground in modern science. Gravity, it might be wrongly

argued, was a discovery made on the back of a falling ‘single’ apple, yet an

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abundance of bodies exhibited similar behaviour. Whatever features we aim to

identify as components of intonational meaning therefore, even categories for that

matter, they would only explain their own particular behaviours, but not those of the

system- or fundamental function- of intonational meaning. This is, of course, because

unlike the apple and all the falling bodies around it which shared similar

characteristics, those ‘features’ or ‘categories’ of intonational meaning are all

fundamentally atypical to each other in terms of behaviour. A falling tone is not a

rising tone, a pitch accent above the fundamental frequency is not a pitch accent

below it, pitch variations in tone languages bring altogether different meanings to the

same orthographic qualities, etc.

Intonational meaning has until now only been referred to as theoretical spill from

research on intonation. Intonation studies present a much simpler picture of course as

there is no or little semantic and pragmatic reference to be made when the core

concern is to measure oscillations and amplitudes.

In the preceding paragraphs we have looked at some of the limitations of examining

solely formal features of intonation- a practice which has nevertheless kept many

modern phonologists busy. Such criticism, however, proves not only interesting but

vital for the purposes of proposing new views on intonational meaning and contouring

which is what I shall endeavour to do next.

We end this section therefore, with a rough review of current intonational literature

and having aired some reservations on mainstream approaches. Criticism thus far has

not attempted to undermine the entirety of the work achieved on prosodic

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enhancement of meaning and intonational meaning, but merely to state that much of it

has either not gone far enough, or is basically adopting the wrong approach to the

subject. The general scepticism I am holding against the formal generativist model is

not that understanding the behaviour of particular features is a futile exercise- but that

such an understanding could only ever hope to be one as set in the historical past, in a

static spatial state and disassociated from other related phenomena. Such a notion

essentially equates to a “snapshot understanding” of these phenomena and amounts to

little more than a holiday still when trying to understand social behaviour during a

holiday season. The danger being, of course, that such an approach is rarely able to

predict the overall behaviour of any feature but merely provides information –and

sometimes ample- on a given phenomena as how it once was.

Let me take the discussion further at this stage by closing the critique of current

practices and opening the way in the following section to a new approach. This new

view is aimed at achieving a new understanding of intonational meaning and what

contouring particularly is ‘doing’ to aid this process.

SECTION II

PITCH CONTOURING AS ‘CRITIQUE’ AND THE PRAGMATICS OF INTONATIONAL MEANING

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INTRODUCTION

THE PROPOSAL:

What is contouring?

What is to be contoured?

The segment The syllable The foot The phrase The text

Contour as Critique (critical judgement)

The proposition (message) The lexicon, sentence, text The addressee The speaker (self-criticism) The context

Conclusion

Introduction

In this section I shall introduce the concept of contouring (in all its forms as for the

smallest segment of the phoneme, the syllable, the foot and the phrase) as an agent of

critique to a number of issues at play during discourse and ordinary speech. The view,

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which is in some ways a development from established functions of intonation like

attitude, shall remain the focal point of this research project from now on. In the third

and final section I shall place the question of ‘contouring as critique’ in the midst of

the formalist-functionalist debate and see how well, if at all, it supports one of the

conflicting positions3. Firstly, the main idea of the use of melody and ‘tunes’ as

‘critical judgements’ shall be laid out. Secondly, it shall be applied to the different

‘tone units’ –from simple to complex as listed above, and thirdly, the concept shall

itself be evaluated in terms of its usefulness for pragmatic inference. It is hoped that

intonational contouring itself may by the end, be seen as a distinct phonological tool

that in essence voices an opinion, comments, and criticizes the state of a number of

phenomena the addressee must infer before the proposition is accepted and the

message conveyed. Wherever possible, some examples shall be given in order to

denote some universal qualities of this ‘critical’ function-though only to help state the

case in point for English.

The Critical Function of an Intonational Contour.

Some Theoretical background

Intonational functions have been the subject of studies for many years. In his rather

pedagogical account, Roach (2000) conveniently describes some of these as:

attitudinal, accentual, grammatical, and discourse functions. But despite the many

papers written on the functions of intonation- including some of great value like Anne

Wichmann’s The Attitudinal Effects of Prosody, and How They Relate to Emotion

(2000), the idea of intonational contours as a ‘deictic critique’, has not yet been dealt

with. Let us examine it in detail.

3 My view is that it does, and it does so by adding a new dimension, or indeed another function itself, to those already making up for intonational meaning.

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Intonational cues and contouring have up to now offered us a number of functions.

Yet untold, however, is the story of intonational contouring as an agent of critique.

For a more complete notion of how intonational meaning is constructed, it seems

more than necessary to include new ‘critical functions’ which can offer a view, or

judgement, an opinion or criticism over: (i) the language (or lexicon) in use in the

utterance, (ii) the proposition (or message) of the utterance (iii) the context on which

the utterance is based (iv) the addressee as a newly informed participant, and (v) the

speaker promoting the speech act- but here as self-reference or self-criticism. Because

the concept is rather complex, I shall explain it further.

What I am essentially intending to do, is to envisage intonation (through contouring,

pitch modulations, melodic structuring, etc) as much more than linguistic decoration

or features which do not alter meaning, and converting them into ones which carry a

hitherto unexpected weight of nuances. The aim is to help close the historical gap left

open by phonologists and pragmatists alike with the exception, perhaps, of Halliday

(1967), whose work on information structure and its intonational realization links

these two areas which have been so criminally divided in linguistics. Though not a

‘recent’ work in terms of the life history of linguistics, it nevertheless merits applause

for its reminder that language has in fact plenty to do with sound. Perhaps too often,

despite immensely poignant studies on a great many issues of language, has sound

being forgotten altogether. This would not be much of a shortfall if only the criticism

were true of textual analyses, but sound has also been unbelievably omitted from

phonetic and phonological domains(!). Phonology and pragmatics are- or better still

should be- intrinsically intertwined and one of the strongest marriages amongst the

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sub-disciplines of linguistics. Since Halliday’s Intonation and Grammar in British

English, this interface has been broken down somewhat, perhaps due to a revived

interest in syntactical issues following Chomsky. Information structure has survived

as a relevant theme in linguistics up until today and has even found a comfortable

sitting in discourse analysis- if only after some prior dress rehearsals. It is time to

redress the issue of pragmatic inference as one not only bearing relevance to syntactic

realizations –as there most naturally exists one here - but as one inextricably bound to

the painful (for some) question of sounds. For intonational meaning to be understood

in all its might, pragmatic meaning and implicatures (Grice 1975, 1978), the full

scope of Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969), intonational issues cannot be

studied somewhere else, unrelated and as a separate entities from their phonological

constraints. In the real world, pragmatics is –or should be- knowledge derived from

sound (lexical and syntactical included). Phonology is the straight jacket pragmatics

needs to wear so as to exist.

So let’s return to the proposal. If prosodic features account for the way things are said

rather than for what is being said, then one of the tenets of this proposal is to reduce

the gap between ‘how’ and ‘what’. Quite in the spirit of Optimality Theory, the

speaker is left to choose the individual prosodic constraints it sees fit in order to shape

his/her proposition. The speaker chooses, in other words, the extent of the intonational

constraint it sees best suited to fit the conversational implicatures in question. The

candidates in this case being any prosodic feature available The speaker silently

murmurs “if I use this contour on this(these) word(s), the addressee will think I mean

this(these) meanings(s)…” (independently from the lexical-semantic inference). But

how does this proposal of intonational contouring as critique work?

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Some practical considerations

The segmental structure of the contours: Where contours fall

In order to explain the detail of the proposal, I shall present two sets of practical

features; the type of units or segmental features on which the phonological

phenomena will act upon; and the nature and direction of the critical functions of the

intonational contours. The following criteria are not as important as the pragmatic

functions listed later but their purpose is to offer an idea of the boundaries that can

restrict the intonational structure. Although others prefer to speak of ‘tone-groups’

when setting the boundaries for contours, I have used the following classification for

the purpose of simplicity.

The proposal views contouring and the use of intonational features as acting upon:

(i) The phoneme (smallest segment): As this is only one unit without variation

and reference no contouring is possible. Only variations of “stress” would

be possible at this level. This is more prosodic than intonational, however.

(ii) The syllable: as this is a slightly bigger unit, some gradience may occur

and hence intonation would be possible.

(iii) The foot: this may include a number of syllables which would definitely

make it possible for more substantial contouring.

(iv) The word: irrespective of the number of syllables within this unit the

possibility for contouring is expanded further. This boundary group will

affect intonational meaning to a certain extent and more so than the

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previous boundaries, but it is the next stage which offers the most potential

for meaning.

(v) The sentence: Here the boundary is bigger and so there is an added

potential for the contour to develop. It is important to note that even if

some contours extend beyond the sentence level, this is by far the most

comfortable level contours can work in. It is difficult, for example, to find

examples where one intonational contour extends throughout many

sentences (in spoken or written language) whilst still adhering to one

“sense” denoted by the contour. Usually, the lexical constraints help to

arrange the intonational boundaries where the sense behind one sentence is

reflected in a similar sense given by the intonational contour.

The nature of the pragmatic functions in intonation: Who is affected and by what?

This part looks at a crucial part of the entire proposal, namely, how intonation offers a

critical perspective on speech acts or the entire communicative event. Some nuances

from the work done on attitudinal meaning may spark as a comparison at this stage,

but they are both quite different. Attitudinal meaning has a finite definition which

related to a particular state of mind; anger, surprise, excitement, etc where the speaker

uses a particular contour to indicate (or enhance the meaning of ) his or her state as

either supported or not linguistically. Amongst the many functions of attitudinal

meaning might be those which express a diametrically different nuance to that of the

linguistic medium. Sarcasm and irony, for example, are often at play in opposite

directions between linguistic and intonational meanings. So for any given linguistic

cue, the speaker is given a choice of complementation or contrast by the intonational

contour chosen. This underlying duality of the linguistic message on the one hand and

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the prosodic options of performance on the other– linguistic versus the intonational

cues- is a vital feature of the intonational function as critique to which I refer.

Intonational meaning has everything to do with the abundance of prosodic resources

available to the speaker. Unlike a phonological rule ordering approach so common of

generativism, the speakers in the intonational critique model have choices to make in

the plethora of prosodic functions available to them. For the speaker, the utterance

may be intonatioanlly performed within its fundamental frequency, using the

“expected” intonational patterns, or using a given intonational pattern to produce a

given and controlled effect. To some extent, the idea of deliberately using a pattern to

produce an effect NOT PRESENT in the linguistic medium, is not dissimilar to the

perlocutionary act of speech acts, as in Austin (1969, 1970). A final word before

some tenets of the critical judgement model are seen in detail regarding this deliberate

interference suggested by the alteration of expected contouring patterns. Such as all

spoken language necessitates an intonational framework on which to ‘mount’ its

message, so do human beings need clothing (except for nudist resorts) by which to

‘mount’ their own messages. The semiotic “implicature” of dress codes in western

societies is taken very seriously by some as it is, in essence, a critical judgement on

the surrounding world. The dress code is a statement of conformity and disconformity

to enhance distinctiveness from a common norm4. Likewise, the use intonational

pattering voices an opinion on the lexical and syntactical components of the linguistic

medium. Individual uses of intonation, therefore, mark the individual’s standing on

two points (i) his sense of conformity with intonational use generally and, (ii) his

sense of conformity (or not) with the conventional implicatures of the utterance.5

4 Taking the ‘punk dress code’ as an example, you might say that it represents a breakaway from ordinary dress codes. It is in effect a statement of divergence from a norm.5 I refer to Grice’s sense of implicatures as described in Grice (1975).

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Further discussion on implicatures shall take place after looking at Hymes’s

contribution to intonational meaning and how that relates to the intonational critique

model being proposed.

Two words on Hymes. Early on, Hymes (1964) referred to an interesting set of

conditions regarding the communicational event. Hymes firstly defined addressor,

addressee, and audience, as factors which together may influence the nature of the

discourse. He touched on the honorifics of knowing more about addressees during the

speech event and as well as some useful notions on topic and setting, he made

important distinctions of context, as Grice did later. Hymes sub-divides context into

six further connotations: channel (type of contact participants maintain ie, speech,

writing, singing etc), code (what language, dialect, style is being used), message-form

(what form is intended- chat, debate, sermon, fairy-tale, sonnet, letter… etc), event

(the nature of the communicative event as part of a larger genre), key (evaluation,

judgement, etc) and purpose (what the participant’s intentions were as a result of

these). Of great significance to the intonational critique model is the notion of key,

though essentially used as an ‘evaluation tool’ for Hymes (1962, 1964) and as one

that offers a critical underpinning of the speech act.

May conversational implicatures be intonational implicatures?

Like Hymes does in relation to context, Grice’s notions on implicature and reference

provide a relevant set of features on which to build the critical model being presented.

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Particularly relevant, is the shift from conventional implicatures to conversational

implicatures (as a shift from linguistic to addressor-addressee based features of

cooperation), as well as new roles for context. In similar fashion to the notional shift

from Classical Theory to Prototype Theory of concepts, another shift of emphasis

occurs from the linguistically-definitional to the ‘fuzzy’-inferential between

conventional implicature principles and conversational implicature principles. Grice’s

Cooperative Principle and its maxims (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner), play

important roles in making communicative events more of a hermeneutical experience

as opposed to a solely linguistic one. If interpretation plays a bigger role than do

linguistic features in the communicative process, then, we can assume that pragmatic

inference enjoys a greatly enhanced role than previously thought of. As prosodic and

paralinguistic features are also pragmatic in nature, the case in favour of

understanding through inference (like intonational cues) is automatically enhanced

therefore.

What aspects do ‘intonational implicatures’ criticize and how?

As we have said earlier, much of the composition of intonational meaning was down

to the action of prosodic functions on the utterance. These, in turn, accounted for

shifts in attitudinal (Wichmann 2002), emotional, parenthetical, and emphatic effects

of the utterance. Although some work has been carried out on these areas the

relationship between prosody and pragmatics is a very complex one. No better

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illustration therefore, than to see this relationship in the light of the intonational

features which, through contouring, form critical judgements on conventional

implicatures of the utterance. There are five main areas that prosodic features

(including stress which we shall not discuss here in detail), form judgements upon, by

using intonational contours. These are message, ‘language’ or lexicon, addressee,

addressor, and context. Though some descriptions of English tone groups have only

accounted for fewer examples that the ones I shall consider here, a better example

would definitely be those as described by O’Connor and Arnold (1973), which are:

The Low Drop; the High Drop; the Take Off; the Low Bounce; the Switchback; the

Long Jump; the High Bounce; the Jacknife; the High Dive; and the Terrace. It is not

necessary-for the purpose of describing how intonational meaning forms an opinion

about the utterance and its context- to describe or map each one of these contours in

detail. An awareness that at least ten of these contours can be in use in any given

communicative event is all that is sufficient at this stage.

(i) The message (or general implicature) the addressor has delivered:

Some studies have concentrated on preaccentual pitch to account for

thematic changes (Gussenhoven, 1997), but a shift in contour –an

accentuated head or pre-head may be used to ‘comment’ or emphasize

an aspect of the implicature that needs to be distinguished. Because of

the need to view prosodic features in relation with each other (and

NOT as isolated ‘truths’ via the exacerbation of one sole element), I

will not say more on this until later.

(ii) The ‘language’ used : (or a conventional implicature): Here, prosodic

and intonational features may be used to enhance a judgement on the

particular quality of the language used. At this level, prosody may be

22

used to comment on the ‘register’ of the language or the choice of

lexicon used. A judgement or criticism of this nature would probably

take the form of an initial word-level stress on the ‘candidate word’

with an overemphasized intonational contour.

(iii) The Addressee: Prosodic features might also be used to emphasize the

directional notions of the implicature. Perhaps there is no specific

mention in the lexicon of the addressee but an intonational contour

working well above the fundamental frequency (F0) might imply an

indirect suggestion of the addressee. It may be safely assumed (and an

interesting set of experiments could be designed to test this: that

contours which work well above the fundamental frequency – may be

judged to be of “light criticism”- and those working below it would

imply “forceful (even aggressive) criticism”.

(iv) The addressor: Any reference to “the self” would probably carry a

wide variety of connotations depending on the chosen contour. It is my

view that a very pronounced contour, or one displaying more than one

accentual shift is only seeking to attract attention to it-self. A short,

precise, uncontoured pattern would naturally suggest “don’t pay any

attention to ‘me’ – be it the word or the notion of ‘me’. So a

ME cannot be the same as a ME

H*LH H% HL

Intonational meaning at the word level is largely constrained by pitch

variations and accents. Over the sentence level, however, a distinct

contour maybe realized which also has a function for semogenesis or

23

meaning creation. In this particular case, a prosodic variation can have

a number of meanings over the “self” in the utterance.

(v) The context: Studies on context are becoming increasingly abundant in

recent times and not surprisingly so. Judging by the inferences made

by intonational variations on context, it would be very easy to find

examples in which context is made an object of critique by the use of

intonation alone and NOT, by the linguistic framework. Take the

sentence:

THEY WANT TO GO TO A PARTY

_________________________________________

A)

_________________________________________

B)

_________________________________________

C)

__________________________________________

From the examples above, it may reasonably be assumed that for an

equal lexical and syntactical input, A), B) and C) would nevertheless

display very different “opinions” as to the contextual notion of “party”.

24

In A), the basic connotation is an interrogative one and this might not

necessarily yield any extra information on it. B) and C) however, do

tell us indirect information about the party as in B) the contour of party

begins higher than the preceding boundary and therefore entails

excitement. In C), the contour drops and this would obviously entail a

negative attitudinal position to the context. We still do not know

enough (via the contours) about the contextual “party” however, only

some attitudinal inferences are here sought. But lets attend it and then

compare the following intonational meanings derived from this same

comment, say, by three different party goers:

“IT WAS GREAT”_____________________________

A)

________________a_____________b

B)

_________________a_______b_____

C)

__________________a______b_____

Counter intuitively, the three variations above actually express the

same notion about context in these examples. This is because the

25

prosodic variations are much more complex than a straight mapping of

‘rises for positives and downfalls for negatives’ paradigm suggests. In

effect, because we have a play of TWO prosodic features (stress and

intonation) on one word, a rise does not mean ‘good’ as a fall does not

mean ‘bad’ for a judgement of context. A), B) and C) all mean ‘great’,

but whilst A) suggests this from type of modulation in the contour, the

accentual features of B) and C) –their small breadth of pitch variation

(or distance form ‘a’ to ‘b’), makes the lexical “GREAT” into a

categorical feature. It supports the conventional implicature of the

lexicon in other words, making ‘great’ nothing other than great.

Consider the diagram below. Here a new set of features are displayed

and although predicting their meaning is a tempting exercise, no rule

may be made with regards to breadth of contour span as in both A) and

B) below, distance a-b is the same as in the previous example, yet in

this case the meaning of great could be a short, above previous

boundary line, “sarcastic” comment of ‘great’, and be essentially

meaning “ I am saying ‘great’ but I am not meaning it”.

“IT WAS GREAT”

_______________________________

A)

_____________________a___b_____

B)

______________________a__b_____

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It is impossible to conceive the whole notion of prosodic features as having direct,

one to one semantic mappings with their linguistic counterparts. There exists an

enormous range of possible meanings to be derived from any aspect of prosody, let

alone intonational features. Finding a rule for these must be, almost from the onset, a

futile exercise although there are certain typologies of intonational meaning which

may remain standard. The case of interrogatives as end rising and declaratives as

falling, are only one general example. Certain intonational typologies, however, are

not the entire picture, and as Grabe and Post (2002) suggest in Intonational Variation

in the British Isles, ‘intonational differences between dialects of one language can be

greater than those of two different languages’. The case would most certainly stand,

therefore, that intonational differences between speakers of the same dialect, can also

be greater than those expressed by speakers of different dialects.

This immense world of choices left open in the construction of intonational meaning

has to dispel rule ordering approaches outright as an explanation of a particular

implicature. As we saw from the examples above, rules would soon be outweighed by

their exceptions. Such models, therefore, are left dangerously at risk of imploding by

the very nature of their construction. A better philosophy of intonational meaning

would therefore be that which only needs to account for the constraints (as in

Optimality Theory)- which I suggest could be those of- message, lexicon, addressee,

speaker, and context as seen above as aspects which the intonation ‘criticises’, and

therefore varies according to.

Conclusion

27

There have been an ambitious number of issues treated in this section and ones which

might prove difficult to summarize. The principal idea of this section was to introduce

those notions without which I believe any analysis of intonational meaning is

necessarily incomplete. Pragmatics, therefore, in its relation to implicature and

inference was juxtaposed alongside those elements which account for a phonological

explication of intonation, like the particular segments on which intonational

contouring can take place (phoneme, syllable, word, etc). An attempt to analyse these

two phenomena in conjunction was therefore made with the resulting in the

development of a new notion of intonation as providing critical judgements over the

communicative process. Not a simple task. The idea, however, may survive some

detailed scrutiny when intonational meaning is seen not as exhibiting a finite number

of formal categories, but as forming part of a system of multiple functional features

working together. Only thus, can the analysis of the present section be understood.

Deciding how much importance to give to the newly incorporated notion of intonation

as ‘critique’, is also not immediately apparent. On the one hand, it is a concept not

often referred to in the literature surrounding this subject and might merit some

originality due to this, yet it may do little more than assign itself a place alongside

some of the other ‘functions of intonation’ described thereon as pointed out by Roach

(2000). It may be that sometime in the future particular ways of emitting critical

judgements will be matched with their corresponding intonational contours and this

story will have a happy ending. This might never occur, on the other hand, and I may

want to command myself the responsibility of defining whatever categories of critique

I may find with whatever intonational correlates I consider suit.

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The short discussion on the formalist/functionlist debate on intonational meaning

which will take up Section III of this essay, I have deliberately left until the end. No

matter of greater general overall content could take the place of formalist or

functionlist frameworks in linguistics. No other question, conversely, might bear such

underlying theoretical importance for this discipline however. That is why, rather than

having given it a passing mention in any of the parts discussed thus far, I shall close

the essay with this general debate inside which- of course- each and every one of the

items treated earlier have their entire explicative fervours exposed- rightly or wrongly,

of course, depending on which side of the argument you choose to be.

SECTION III:

Intonational Meaning and the formalist/functionalist Debate

29

From the preceding sections we saw how important for this essay the association of

phonology and pragmatics was. The view of intonational phonology accounted for in

this essay were necessarily ones in conjunction with language in use, and not one of

laboratory phonology as might be the preferred stance of Pierrehumbert, Beckam and

Ladd, for example. The general conception of intonational paradigms discussed and

argued for earlier could not end at a categorization or representational level. For us,

and those viewing intonation as an interface between more than one discipline,

functional aspects are not just preferable but vital. Certain coexistence cannot be

denied however, and if either view is to be taken seriously and backed by scientific

evidence, the theoretical assumptions that functionalism might more often be

identified with need also to be supported by figures, equations and squiggles, or does

it?

The entire point is that it might not, and it would only ever be relevant if wishing to

copy a formalist strategy. Whereas formalism exhibits linguistic rules as algorithms,

functionalism need not conjure up a similar set of formulae that ‘lives up’ to formalist

expectations. For functionalism the discourse strategy is heuristic not formulaic.

Where formalism deconstructs the units of analysis, functionalism adopts integrative

strategies. Whereas formalism deals with internal structures, functionalism attempts to

relate the internal and the external. If formalism is a top-down approach,

functionalism is a bottom-up one. Whilst formalism remains in one particular domain

of linguistics, functionalism seeks interdisciplinarity amongst the different fields. This

point readdresses the issue of intonation and pragmatics which in turn defines

intonational meaning as a functional performative act.

30

Perhaps one of the most poignant distinctions between formalism and functionalism,

however, has to be that of form and meaning. As formalism is basically a

deconstructive approach, it would not be entirely out of standing for formalism to

want to separate these two concepts. Form, say the formalists is one thing and

meaning another. By contrast, functionalism integrates these two aspects of language

which- to judge from everyday usage by every capable speaker of every possible

language- are aspects which are inherently joined by its usage in order for

communication to occur! What remains a perennial nerve-racking practice of

formalists, is that whatever phenomena they choose as objects of their study, they

obligatorily decontextualize it first and examine it in isolation.

Intonational meaning cannot possibly be construed, as some might have once

pretended, as a sum of the findings of (semantic) or conventional meaning with the

findings of categorization studies on intonation. This preposterous idea falls a little

short of studying the behaviour of dolphins as with the example dolphin having lived

all his life in an artificial pool. Because formalists are nativists though, they might

argue the dolphin’s genetic make up is the same as that of an ordinary dolphin out at

sea. A better diachronic argument however, might suggest that, in time, that same

genetic make up would itself be altered by the external conditions surrounding it. This

wouldn’t stop a formalist from asking the dolphin to speak naturally about its

dolphinness and by doing so acquire some testable insight into its dolphinity.

Decontextualization, in other words, presents an undeniable danger to the

comprehensive study of any ‘living’ phenomena. As language bears the

characteristics of a living thing,- which develops over time and is subject to

31

innumerable external stimuli which alter its behaviour over time- its individual

features cannot be studied in isolation away from the systematic framework it

naturally belongs to. Intonational meaning cannot be dislocated from utterance,

speaker, hearer and context. These four elements should never be separated from a

coherent study of the phenomenon in question.

There emerges a ray of hope by the growing field of computational linguistics. Soon

enough, the truth abiding individuals of formalist experimental methods might be left

aside in favour of corpus based analysis where (i) language in use and (ii) language as

used by a vast quantity of speakers can be traced and be put to objective studies. Till

then, we might still need to hear how intonational meaning might, perhaps, be an

oscillatory waveform category of varying pitch accents mapped out on a linguist’s lab

wall.

CONCLUSION:

32

Intonational meaning is many parts phonology mixed with many parts pragmatics.

Which way the balance tips is probably a question of taste, or ultimately, of

preferences. Maybe the phonologist and pragmatist both argue that it lies more

securely within their own domain than their counterpart’s. What this essay has

attempted to state, in one way or another, is that the story does not lie in one or the

other’s domain, but is a construction of both domains. Another aspect that this essay

attempted to argue in favour of was, that categorization is a process that only useful in

order to explain things which are by nature non-categorical. In other words, the fact

that I myself used categorical notions in Section I in order to describe intonational

phenomena, these were hopefully understood later to be descriptions of a system that

could supplant them with functions. Sections II and III together combined to form an

argument along the lines that- pragmatic features are intrinsically linked to functional

issues which then coalesce to produce a comprehensible notion of intonational

meaning.

Section II also saw the introduction of an additional feature of intonational functions

such as the use of intonation for the purpose of expressing an opinion or being a

critical tool of- a communicative event. This in itself did not pretend to have any other

role than that of adding to a set of features which together contribute to the

understanding of the subject in question. Although potentially ambitious, the choice

of incorporating these three aspects under one banner (each one of which could merit

a paper on their own), is twofold. Firstly, it is in the spirit of interdisciplinarity that

these phenomena be best understood in conjunction, as they themselves function

within the bearings of more than one domain. Excluding a given discipline from the

arguments of a multidisciplinary phenomenon might be constraining rather than

33

exemplary. Secondly, the way the issues in this essay have been presented have

allowed intonational meaning to be seen from the very smallest of prismas of the

segment, to the much broader theoretical accounts of formalism and functionalism.

Any other view which would discern from including such amplitude, could lie in

danger of seeing its object as only partially treated.

There may still remain, however, after any account that is linguistic in nature, many

controversies left out in the open. As this is in itself a criticism, I by no means pretend

this view to be exempt from any further criticism. Intonational meaning, though

seemingly harmless, still lies at the heart of one of the most important controversies in

linguistics.

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34

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