Seminar on the Pragmatics Prosody

Ling 814 -- Seminar on the Pragmatics of Prosody

Instructor: Craige Roberts

This seminar will be an intense inquiry into the pragmatics of prosody, with particular attention to questions related to the phenomena of Prosodic Focus and the prosodic marking of Information Structure. The coursework will be in keeping with the seminar format. Students will be expected to read an extensive list of papers, participate in discussion and lead the discussion of one or two papers. The written work will consist primarily of preparing a personal annotated bibliography of readings selected with the help of the instructor and other class participants. The motivation for this topic is as follows.

It is obvious that the prosodic contour of an utterance influences its interpretation. Subtle cues involving rate, rhythm, choice of tune, pitch range, and volume are important in conveying the speaker's attitude towards what s/he says, often implicating far more than the literal content of the utterance. But it has been observed that sometimes prosody directly influences that literal content itself, with different prosodic structures yielding different truth conditions for utterances with the same syntactic structure. This is evident in the classic examples of Association with Focus, exemplified by the difference between Rebecca only planted SEEDLINGS in Lottie’s garden vs. Rebecca only planted seedlings in LOTTIE’s garden. In these examples, prosodic prominence is roughly indicated by capitalization. The first might be true even though Rebecca also planted seedlings in her own garden, making the second false.

The semantics literature over the past twenty years has generally agreed that the effect of prosodic Focus on truth conditions in Association with Focus is indirect: it puts constraints on the way that the context of utterance interacts with interpretation, via restricting the pragmatically given domain of the operator (only in the above examples). But this raises a number of other questions, ripe for research:

Is the phenomenon of Association with Focus an isolated case, or does it point to more general insights into the role of prosody in interpretation?
- Is there a general explanation for prosodic Focus effects, of which Association with Focus is but a specific sub-case?
- How are prosodic Focus effects related to other prosodic effects on interpretation? For example, what role does prosody play in conveying other roles in Information Structure: Topic, Contrastive Topic, Question under Discussion, etc.? Are the mechanisms involved independent of those involved in Focus?

What features of the prosodic structure of an utterance bear on our understanding of its Focal properties?

In the semantics literature, it is generally assumed that what is crucial in Association with Focus for English is the placement of the nuclear pitch accent (the last pitch accent in the intonation phrase, assuming a ToBI-transcription of the utterance). But there is growing evidence from the experimental investigation of prosody to argue that pitch accent choice is vital, as well. How does pitch accent choice affect interpretation, and what does this tell us about the compositional semantic interpretation of an utterance? about the semantics/pragmatics interface?
It has been argued that in some languages (e.g., Japanese), prosodic Focus is a function not of pitch accent placement, but of prosodic phrasing and associated pitch range modulation. What is the range of prosodic features that can bear on interpretation? Are they all related to compositional semantics in the same indirect fashion as suggested for prosodic Focus in English and other similar languages?

What would all this tell us about the structure of the grammar for a natural language? Assuming that there are independent grammars for the syntactic structure of a language and for generating its prosodic contours, how are the resulting structures related?

What does the way that prosody influences interpretation tell us about what a "context of utterance" is: how it is structured and how it generally bears on interpretation?

Making predictions, as opposed to post hoc explanations, about the influence of prosodic Focus on interpretation requires a non-ad hoc theory of contextual influence on interpretation, and in particular, for Association with Focus, a constrained theory of domain restriction. What does Association with Focus tell us about how domain restriction works?
A good deal of recent work in formal pragmatics pertains to the Information Structure of discourse. What role does prosody play in Information Structure, and how is that mediated by compositional semantic interpretation?

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