LINGUIST List 23.2363
Thu May 17 2012
Diss: Phonetics/Pragmatics/Semantics: Lai: 'Rises All the Way Up: The interpretation of prosody, discourse attitudes and dialogue structure'
Editor for this issue: Xiyan Wang
<xiyanlinguistlist.org>
Date: 16-May-2012
From: Catherine Lai <clai
inf.ed.ac.uk>
Subject: Rises All the Way Up: The interpretation of prosody, discourse attitudes and dialogue structure
E-mail this message to a friend
Institution: University of Pennsylvania
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2012
Author: Catherine Lai
Dissertation Title: Rises All the Way Up: The interpretation of prosody, discourse attitudes and dialogue structure
Dissertation URL:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~laic/dissertation/index.html
Linguistic Field(s):
Phonetics
Pragmatics
Semantics
Dissertation Director:
Jiahong Yuan
Florian Schwarz
Mark Liberman
Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation is about what prosody contributes to dialogueinterpretation. The view of prosody developed in this account is based ondetailed quantitative investigations of the prosodic forms andinterpretations of cue word and declarative responses, specifically withrespect to the distribution and interpretation of terminal pitch rises.Drawing on results from corpus, production and perception studies, I arguethat the underlying contribution of terminal rises is to signal that thedialogue has not come to a viable stopping point with respect to the taskat hand. This approach enables us to explain previously incongruentfindings about the connection between rises and attitudes like uncertainty.From this perspective, the perception of such attitudes does not arisedirectly from prosodic form, but instead depends upon a range of contextualfactors. The experimental results indicate that the most important of theseis how an utterance relates to the current question under discussion,rather than sentence or dialogue act type. However, variation in prosodicform is also affected by higher level factors like dialect, task, andspeaker role: rises become more frequent on non-questioning moves as theneed to co-ordinate becomes greater.
The experimental results allows us to make significant headway inclarifying the relationship between the prosodic, semantic and informationstructural properties of responses. This, in turn, sheds light on severaloutstanding questions about the contribution of the rise in fall-riseaccents and its relationship to information structural categories likecontrastive topic. Overall, we see that rises don't act on the propositionthat carries them, nor do they mark out specific IS categories. Insteadthey reveal the state of the discourse from the speaker's perspective. Froma methodological point of view, I show that to gain a robust understandingthe contribution of prosody on a particular meaning dimension, we need totake into account the baseline induced by the discourse configurationitself. These studies show the utility of using functional data analysistechniques to give more direct view of prosodic variation in largerdatasets without manual prosodic annotation.
Page Updated: 17-May-2012