Form-Meaning Interface in Constraint-based Unified Grammar: Prosody and Pragmatics

The present work aims at a formal description of the interface between prosody and pragmatics in the framework of Constraint-based Unified Grammar CUG. It focuses on two main aspects of this interface: (1) intonation patterns vs. speech acts and (2) stress vs. topicfocus articulation. First, four terminal contours are proposed: fall, mid, rise, and high rise. They are then mapped into the speech-act types of asserting, asking, requesting, etc., centering on the grammatical constructions of nonstandard questions. Second, four levels of stress are also proposed: 0, 1, 2, 3. They are linked to the four types of topic-focus articulation: zero topic, topic, narrow focus and contrastive topic/focus. With these prosodic markings, various discourse-oriented data are analyzed to illustrate and support the principle of compositionality for building up of lexical to phrasal constructions as well as various principles and conventions in CUG such as principle of ordering, stress lineup, and TFA composition.