Question intonation contours as dynamic epistemic operators

Prieto, Pilar; Borràs-Comes, Joan

doi:10.1007/s11049-017-9382-z

Cited by 15 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Further support for the role of intonation in conveying information regarding commitment and agreement between interlocutors has been provided by empirical work on other Romance varieties, such as Puerto Rican Spanish (Armstrong, 2012) and Catalan (Prieto & Borràs-Comes, 2018). In these studies, the authors show that question intonation can encode fine-grained distinctions related to the speaker's own commitment to the proposition expressed through some form of epistemic stance about the conveyed content (Heritage, 2012).…”

Section: The Epistemic Nature Of Intonational Meaningmentioning

confidence: 93%

Individual empathy levels affect gradual intonation-meaning mapping: The case of biased questions in Salerno Italian

Orrico

D’Imperio

2020

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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The paper investigates the interplay between intonational cues and individual variability in the perceptual assessment of speakers' epistemic bias in Salerno Italian yes-no questions. We present a perception experiment in which we manipulated pitch span within the nuclear configuration (both nuclear accent and boundary tone) to predict degree of perceived positive bias (i.e., expected positive answer) to yes-no question stimuli. Our results show that a wider pitch span within the nuclear region predicts a higher degree of perceived positive bias, while negative bias is predicted by narrow pitch span. Crucially, though, two interacting sources of listener variability were uncovered, i.e., prolonged exposure to a non-native dialect as well as degree of empathy (i.e., Empathy Quotient, EQ). Exposure to non-native phonological systems was found to affect the way pitch span is mapped onto perceived epistemic bias, through category interference, though mediated by EQ levels. Specifically, high-empathy listeners were more affected by degree of non-native dialect exposure. EQ scores were hence found to have an effect on gradual span manipulation by interacting with the dialect exposure effect. These results advance our understanding of the intonation-meaning mapping by taking into account both the impact of gradual phonetic cues on meaning processing as well as uncovering sources of cognitive variability at the perceiver's level.

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Section: The Epistemic Nature Of Intonational Meaningmentioning

confidence: 93%

Individual empathy levels affect gradual intonation-meaning mapping: The case of biased questions in Salerno Italian

Orrico

D’Imperio

2020

Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology

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“…Intonational tunes (at least some of them, and at least in English) contribute meaning in terms of discourse phenomena like speaker commitment, without altering the truth-conditional semantics of the sentences they accompany. For views on a broader variety of English intonational tunes than just monotonically rising terminal contours, see Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg (1990); Bartels (1999); Constant (2012); Kraus (2018); Göbel (2019); for views on intonational meaning outside of English, see Truckenbrodt, Sandalo & Abaurre (2008); Bhatt & Dayal (2014); Prieto & Borràs-Comes (2018).…”

Section: Taking Stockmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embedded Rising Declaratives and Embedded Quotation

Rudin

2019

SALT

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Declarative sentences uttered with rising intonation are used to ask biased questions. Do they share a denotation with interrogatives, despite their declarative form? Or do they serve as requests for information despite sharing a denotation with other declaratives? This paper explores the behavior of rising declaratives embedded under rogative speech-act verbs, and shows them to be invariably quotative. As such, these observations might just as likely pose problems for the semantics of embedded quotation under rogative verbs as for the semantics of rising declaratives. This paper pursues the former path. * This work wouldn't exist but for Donka Farkas, Pranav Anand, and Adrian Brasoveanu pushing me to elucidate an objection initially put forth handwavily. It has benefitted along the way from suggestions

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“…Similar pragmatic differences have been found to affect the prosody of polar questions in various other languages. In particular, a prosodic distinction between information-seeking and confirmation-seeking questions or between biased and non-biased questions has been found in experimental studies for several varieties of Romance languages, with authors frequently pointing to the relevance of other factors like the speaker’s confidence in inferred information or the strength of their bias, also termed speaker certainty or commitment (e.g., Armstrong, 2017; Armstrong & Prieto, 2015, for Puerto Rican Spanish; Prieto & Borràs-Comes, 2018, for Central Catalan; Grice & Savino, 1995, 2003, for Bari Italian; Michelas et al, 2016, for French; Vanrell et al, 2013, for Majorcan Catalan; Vanrell et al, 2014, for Sardinian).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The speaker’s level of certainty regarding the checked proposition influences the prosodic realization of the question (e.g., Pheby, 1975, for German; for Romance languages, Armstrong, 2017; Armstrong & Prieto, 2015; Michelas et al, 2016; Prieto & Borràs-Comes, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aren’t Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

Arnhold

Braun²,

Romero

2020

Lang Speech

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As first observed by Ladd in 1981, English polar questions with high negation (e.g., Aren’t they adding a menu item?) can be used both to check the speaker’s belief that the proposition p is true (e.g., p = they are adding a menu item) and to check the addressee’s belief that p is not true (¬ p). We hypothesized that this ambiguity can be disambiguated prosodically. We further hypothesized that the prosodic disambiguation is absent in German, because the checked proposition can be marked morpho-syntactically, with questions with high negation checking p and low negation questions (e.g., Are they not adding a menu item?) checking ¬ p. A production study tested these hypotheses with 24 speakers of Western Canadian English and German each (764 and 767 total utterances, respectively). The results showed that, when the speaker originally believed p and the addressee implied ¬ p, English speakers preferred questions with high negation over low negation questions, confirming Ladd’s observation, and used intonation to mark whose proposition they were checking, as hypothesized. By contrast, German speakers marked this distinction morpho-syntactically, realizing mostly questions with high negation to check their own proposition and low negation questions to check the addressee’s proposition. Their prosody, in turn, was largely determined by the morpho-syntactic question form. The study further manipulated the speaker’s certainty of the checked proposition, but, in contrast to studies on Romance languages, found that certainty itself was not marked.

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Question intonation contours as dynamic epistemic operators

Cited by 15 publications

References 34 publications

Individual empathy levels affect gradual intonation-meaning mapping: The case of biased questions in Salerno Italian

Individual empathy levels affect gradual intonation-meaning mapping: The case of biased questions in Salerno Italian

Embedded Rising Declaratives and Embedded Quotation

Aren’t Prosody and Syntax Marking Bias in Questions?

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