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Title:
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Quantifier Scope and the Role of Intonation in Greek
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Author:
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Mary Baltazani
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of California, Los Angeles
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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2002
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Phonology
Pragmatics
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Subject Language(s):
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Greek
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Director(s):
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Sun-Ah Jun
Carson Schütze
Hilda Koopman
Daniel Büring
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Abstract:
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In this thesis I give a pragmatic account of the relation between intonation and meaning in Greek. I argue that the main function of intonation is to anchor an utterance to its context: different prosodic realizations of the same sentence signal different partitions of that sentence into old and new parts--i.e., different information structures--which make it appropriate for different contexts.
In the first part of the thesis, I establish how information structure categories are prosodically realized in different sentence types in Greek (statements, negatives, questions) and show that different rules apply for encoding focus and background across sentence types.
In the second part of the thesis, I show through experimental evidence that even when the intonation/information structure organization of an utterance makes a truth conditional difference, the effect is still pragmatic and not semantic.
I present results from three experiments which tested the hypothesis that distinct prosody reflects distinct underlying scope relations in scope-ambiguous sentences. These experiments examined how sentences containing two quantificational elements are produced and interpreted. Each experimental sentence was embedded in two different contexts and the expectation that each of the contexts would induce a distinct prosodic realization of that sentence was confirmed. In the perception part of the three experiments, though, results are not consistent. In the first two experiments, the interpretation listeners gave to the utterances they heard depended on the intonation: the focused quantifier was interpreted with wide scope. However, in the third experiment listeners gave subjects a wide scope interpretation, regardless the intonation. In other words, focused and backgrounded material did not receive an invariant truth-conditional interpretation, which I take as an argument against dealing with focus in the semantics proper. On the other hand, I found that the disambiguating effect of intonation is a function of context. Intonation encodes information about the context of an utterance: if this context is unambiguous (in experiments 1, 2), the utterance is unambiguous too; if the context is ambiguous (in experiment 3), intonation cannot disambiguate.
This result suggests that intonation is consistently linked with pragmatics and occasional truth conditional effects of intonation are epiphenomenal.
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