How do intonational nuclear tunes impact speech act inferences?
The mapping of syntactic sentence types such as declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives to speech acts like assertions and commands is many-to-one. As a result, listeners must rely on alternative linguistic resources, such as the intonational nuclear tune (the pitch pattern expressed over the final portion of the intonational phrase) the sentence type is realized with, to narrow down the likely intended speech act. Some accounts propose that the way in which intonational nuclear tunes like rises and falls constrain listeners’ speech act inferences is dependent on the syntactic sentence type, while others take a compositional approach, proposing that tunes have an effect on speech act inferences that is independent from the sentence type. I am interested in the degree to which intonational nuclear tunes have a consistent impact on speech act inferences across sentence type. For example, do rising tunes bias listeners toward addressee-oriented speech acts regardless of the sentence type? And what is the mechanism through which they do so?
What sorts of alternative sets are activated by linguistic focus, and which dimensions of intonational prominence are most important for activating these sets?
A distinction is often made between emphasis for contrast, which introduces a set of semantic alternatives, and emphasis for intensity, which involves the selection of something from the highest range of a scale. I am interested in how these two types of meaning are distinguished acoustically and whether listeners are sensitive to these different acoustic manifestations as cues to contrast vs. intensity. For example, my research investigates the role that pitch and duration play in encouraging intensifying interpretations of gradable adjectives as opposed to contrastive ones.
How do the various strategies for conveying focus interact?
Focus can be conveyed via syntactic, prosodic, and lexical means. I am interested in how these various methods interact, i.e. whether they have similar effects in isolation, and whether their combination results in additive effects. Previous research has investigated the interaction of contrastive pitch accents (L+H*) and focus sensitive operators like ‘only.’ My current research focuses on the interaction of lexical and prosodic cues for conveying intensity. For example, I am interested in whether using a lexical intensifier like ‘really’ in combination with an intensifying prominence has an additive effect, or whether the effect of one cancels out the effect of the other.
Poster Presentations
Sandberg, Kate; Cole, Jennifer (2021). The Consistent Meaning of Intonational Tunes Across Sentence Type in American English. 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation. Sonderborg, Denmark. [poster]
Sandberg, Kate; Cole, Jennifer (2022). The Role of Duration in Signaling Scalar Alternative Sets. 9th Experimental Pragmatics Conference. Pavia, Italy. [poster]
Sandberg, Kate; Cole, Jennifer (2022). The Influence of Pitch and Duration on Gradable Adjective Meaning. Midphon 27. St. Louis, Missouri. [poster]
Conference Proceedings
Sandberg, K., Cole, J. (2021) The Consistent Meaning of Intonational Tunes Across Sentence Type in American English. Proc. 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI), 16-20, doi: 10.21437/TAI.2021-4. [paper]