Pragmatics and Prosody

Variation in prosody, or intonation, can influence the interpretation of linguistic phenomena in many languages (Ladd 1980, 1996; Bolinger 1986, 1989). Type and location of prosodic prominence and prosodic phrase boundaries, different overall intonational contours, and changes in intensity, duration, and speaking rate can, in appropriate contexts, help to indicate syntactic attachment, disambiguate scope of modifiers and negation, signal information status, type of speech act, and propositional attitude, and contribute to the licensing of implicatures and to reference resolution, inter alia. In this chapter, we discuss aspects of prosodic variation and pragmatic meaning which have been explored by researchers in linguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. We begin by describing some commonly used frameworks for representing prosody, including the ToBI framework, which we will use to identify prosodic variation throughout. We then examine the pragmatic influence of prosody on the interpretation of syntactic, semantic, and discourse phenomena. We conclude by suggesting some new avenues for research in the relationship between prosody and pragmatic interpretation.