Melodies in Context: The Semantics and Pragmatics of English Rising Declaratives

Intonation, in particular, terminal contours, interacts with morphosyntactic features of clause-types (declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, etc.) to determine the speech act of the utterance and generate complex additional inferences about the context and the speaker. This dissertation addresses the question of how this comes about, focusing on a particular tune + clause-type combination, namely, rising declaratives of American English.

 

English rising declaratives have been associated with a wide range of seemingly disparate meanings. They may be used as tentative assertions (the so-called 'uptalk' uses, often accompanied by social stigma), and they may be used as biased questions. In the latter case, they can sometimes convey positive epistemic bias of the speaker, but other times may convey negative epistemic bias instead. They often convey particular interactional and social meanings, like speaker politeness, but may also convey opposite social meanings, like speaker annoyance or exasperation. Characterizing the core, conventional effect of rising declaratives that crosscuts these varied uses has been a challenge.

 

The dissertation starts out by establishing the existence of two fundamentally different types of rising declaratives. The two are labeled as assertive rising declaratives and inquisitive rising declaratives, and are shown to differ in form and function. The evidence for this argument is drawn from a series of perception experiments that used stimuli representing diverse clause-types. The results corroborate a graded, four-way distinction in meaning between the four sentence types: falling declaratives, assertive rising declaratives, inquisitive rising declaratives, and polar interrogatives. They also demonstrate that assertive rising declaratives pattern essentially like falling declaratives and favor a high rising tune (H* H-H%), whereas inquisitive rising declaratives pattern essentially like polar interrogatives and favor a low rising tune (L* H-H%).

 

Guided by the experimental results, a semantic and pragmatic analysis is proposed. The analysis follows Farkas and Bruce (2010) and Malamud and Stephenson (2015) in having as backdrop an extended Lewisian model of discourse (Lewis 1979). Building on this framework, assertive and inquisitive rising declaratives are analyzed as updating different elements of the conversational scoreboard, thereby giving rise to distinct commitment statuses of the interlocutors (Gunlogson 2003) as well as distinct expectations about future discourse trajectories. Their respective conventional effects are also shown to partially overlap in systematic ways with two other sentence types, falling declaratives and polar interrogatives. Among other things, the analysis is shown to systematically derive both negative and positive epistemic bias of inquisitive uses from the same set of conventions.

 

The analysis is then extended further to address the question of how rising declaratives come to signal complex social inferences, like speaker politeness. Complemented by a pragmatic theory of how listeners reason about alternative discourse moves, the analysis is shown to generate specific predictions about when (i.e., in which types of contexts) an inference of speaker politeness would arise, and when it wouldn’t. These predictions are tested and corroborated in a series of additional experiments that introduce explicit context manipulations. The emerging discussion leads to a broader generalization about the nature of the connection between linguistic expressions and social inferences: They are best construed as derived, second-order inferences that emerge from the activation of linguistic conventions in specific contexts, which trigger additional pragmatic reasoning.

 

The resulting account is shown to reconcile disparate, potentially conflicting observations that have been made about English rising declaratives data. It also sheds light on different ways in which melodies interact with clause-types, content, and context to modify the force of the utterance and the subsequent discourse context, and to suggest nuanced interactional and social inferences.