Meanings of Intonational
Contours
Julia Hirschberg
CS 6998
7/15/2016
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Today
Approaches to understanding contour meaning
What scheme for describing intonation do
they use?
What difference does this make?
What kind of evidence do they look at?
Which is most persuasive?
Which is easiest to study?
How would you determine what an intonational
contour ‘means’?
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Sag & Liberman on Intonation
and Indirect Speech Acts ‘75
Direct vs. Indirect Speech Acts
Illocutionary force (e.g. asking)
Perlocutionary effect (e.g…..)
Can you open that window?
 Wh-questions
‘Real’:
“tilde contour” – why?
“hat pattern”
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Negative-implicating rhetorical:
Hat pattern (if second accent highest)
Evidence?
• Surprise/redundancy: The blackboard’s painted orange!
How do we conclude that any intonation
contour “means” X?
YNQs:
‘Real’: rising or falling
Indirect request: plateau or falling
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Production studies: recorded read skits
Tilde  real wh-q
Neg-implicating wh: second accent more
prominent than first
Perception studies: match recording to context
Tilde  real wh-q and not other
Late peak  either
Terminal rise  real ynq
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Conclusion: some contours can ‘freeze’ a
pragmatic interpretation?
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Hirschberg & Ward ’92:
Rise/fall/rise (L*+H L-H%)
The question: why does one contour have
different meanings?
Uncertainty/incredulity or lack of speaker
commitment to some scalar value
When will it mean one over the other?
Hypothesis: variation in F0, amplitude, duration,
voice quality
Experiment:
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Record same sentence with each
interpretation (pretest)
Analyze each token to extract acoustic and
prosodic features of hypothesis
Resynthesize tokens exchanging all possible
combinations of F0, RMS, duration and
spectral features of ‘uncertainty’ tokens with
‘incredulity’ tokens
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Forced choice task: uncertainty or incredulity?
Results: F0 and spectral features influence
uncertainty/incredulity distinction although
amplitude and duration also differ
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A Compositional Account (Pierrehumbert
& Hirschberg ’92)
Contours convey relationahips
Between current, prior, and following
utterances
Between propositional content and mutual
beliefs
Contour meanings are composites of the
meanings of their pitch accents, phrase accents
and boundary tones
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Pitch Accents
 Convey information status about discourse references,
modifiers, predicates and their relationship to S and H’s
mutual beliefs
H*: X is new and predicated
My name is H* Mark H* Liberman H-H%
L*: X is salient but not part of the speaker’s
predication
…L* Stalin was L* right H-H%
H*+L: X is inferable from S and H’s mutual beliefs
and part of the predication
H*+L Don’t H*+L forget to H*+L take your H* lunch L-L%
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H+L* (H+!H*): X is inferable from S and H’s
mutual beliefs but not part of predication
She’s H+L* teething L-L%
L*+H: X is part of a scale but not part of the
predication
…I fed the L*+H goldfish L-H%
L+H*: X is part of a scale and in S and H’s
mutual beliefs (narrow focus)
I don’t L+H* want L+H* shrimp L-H% I want L+H*
lobster L-L%
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Phrase Accents
Convey relationships among intermediate
phrases, such as which form part of larger
interpretive units
L-: X L- Y means X and Y are interpreted
separately from one another
Do you want a sandwich L- or would you like a soda
H-: X H- Y means X and Y should be
interpreted together
Do you want apple juice H- or orange juice
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Boundary Tones
 Signal the directionality of interpretation of intonational
phrases
H%: X H% Y means interpret X wrt Y
You made seven errors L-H%
What a shame L-L%
We don’t have time to continue today.
L%: X L% Y means no directionality of interpretation
suggested
You made seven errors L-L%
What a shame L-H%
We don’t have time to continue today.
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Unresolved Questions
How do the meanings of pitch accents in a single
phrase combine?
The L* blackboard’s painted H* orange L-L%
How do we distinguish the meaning of a phrase
accent from that of a boundary tone – especially
in intonational phrases with a single intermediate
phrase?
E.g. H* H-L% (plateau) vs. H*H-H% (high-rise
question) vs. H*L-L% (declarative)
Is this framework useful for investigating contour
meaning? E.g. downstepped contours, H+L*
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Next Week
Discussion questions
Project description and preliminary bibliography
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