Intonation and interpretation: phonetics and phonology

By Carlos Gussenhoven. Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody, 2002

416 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intonational meaning is located in two components of language, the phonetic implementation and the intonational grammar. The phonetic implementation is widely used for the expression of universal meanings that derive from ‘biological codes’, meaning dimensions based on aspects of the production process of pitch variation. Three codes are identified, Ohala’s Frequency Code, the Effort Code and the Production Code. In each case, ‘informational’ meanings (which relate to the message) are identified, while for the first two codes also ‘affective’ meanings (relating to the state of the speaker) are discussed. Speech communities will vary in the extent to which they employ those meanings, and in the choices they make when they conflict. What they will never do, however, is change the natural form-function relations that they embody. By contrast, grammaticalised meanings often mimic the natural meanings, but linguistic change may create quite arbitrary form-meaning relations when forms are phonologised, and the semantics is systematised. English grammaticalised intonational meaning concerns information status.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/874d9735c99c4aee44b37d9797a12e0daabc13bc

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Citations in the corpus

Relevance and prosody (2006, background): “First, prosodic inputs to the comprehension process range from the ‘natural’ (e.g. an angry, friendly or agitated tone of voice) to the properly linguistic (e.g. lexical stress or lexical tone).”
Music as a communicative medium (2009, background): “They outline three biological speech codes - of frequency, effort and production - to explain the widespread appearance of similar prosodic structures across cultures (Gussenhoven, 2002, Gussenhoven, 2005; Ohala, 1984; Ohala, 1994).”
Perception of Intonation (2008, background): “It seems natural to attempt to explain similarities in the interpretation of intonational contours by features shared by human speakers (the present proposal follows up on Vaissière, 1995, and Gussenhoven, 2002).”
Prosody in context: a review (2015, background): “Gussenhoven (2002), building on work by Ohala (1983, 1984), argues that variation in the phonetic implementation of intonational features, e.g., in pitch range, the scaling of pitch accents and pitch reset at phrase onset, has its origins in biological factors that relate speaker attributes of size…”
The relationship between intonational phrasing and syntactic structure in language production (2004, background): “For example, pitch accents and prosodic phrasing can communicate information such as discourse structure by signalling which information is given, new, or most salient (Bolinger, 1972; Dahan, Tanenhaus, & Chambers, 2002; Gussenhoven, 2002; Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990; Schafer, 1997; Selkirk, 19”
Salience and the Social Meaning of Declarative Contours (2011, background): “Gussenhoven (2002) divides the range of meanings into two classes: (1) informational meanings, which refer to the message being encoded, and (2) affective meanings, which refer to the speaker of the message.”