Pitch Accent Variation and the Interpretation of Rising Declaratives

A well-known property of English is the encoding of pragmatic speech act meaning in the pitch pattern at the end of a prosodic phrase. A phrase with declarative syntax that ends in a falling pitch trajectory conveys an assertion, while a final rising pitch trajectory conveys a question. The pitch contour across this region of the phrase is the phonetic implementation of an abstract, phonologically specified, representation called the nuclear tune made up of the concatenation of high and low primitives: pitch accents and edge tones.

In this work from my dissertation I test competing accounts of the locus of intonational encoding of the question/assertion contrast. I examine both rising and falling tunes in the context of ongoing work on rising declaratives to determine which part of the pitch contour encodes this aspect of meaning: is it the region spanning the pitch accent or the region of the edge tones? Furthermore, in light of the pervasive variation in intonational form, I also investigate the degree to which variation in the phonetic implementation of the pitch accent and/or edge tones influences listener interpretation. Across three perception experiments, I find that the pitch accent of a tune does not contribute to assertive force. Rather, the distinction between assertive and inquisitive interpretations is cued primarily by the final F0 of the pitch contour regardless of the pitch accent, but that increased overall pitch prominence may trigger a salient focus interpretation that interferes with question/assertion interpretation, providing empirical support for leading compositional theories of intonational meaning.