LING232A/B: Intonation and Meaning

David Beaver and Edward Flemming
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University
Winter and Spring, 1999

 
 

Special Announcements

1/11//99 We will meet tomorrow mnorning (i.e. Tuesday 1/12/99) at 10AM in the phonetics lab to  introduce everybody to the tobitool software etc.

 

Essentials

This seminar is offered as a  two quarter sequence, although we will accept students who wish to take only one quarter. In the winter quarter, the class (232A) will be held on Thursday's, 2:15-5:05, Building 540, room 103. 

David Beaver can be mailed using dib@stanford.edu. His winter office hours are M/W 2:05-3:05, or by appointment.
Edward Flemming can be mailed using flemming@csli.stanford.edu.

 
 

Assignments and Reading

Week 1: 
Work through labelling guide sections 1 and 2.1 to 2.2.
Try at least some of practice exercises 1.
Additional reading: Ladd "Intonational Phonology" 1.1, available in course box.

Week 2: 
Work through labelling guide sections 2.3 to 2.5.
Transcribe the 'easy' sentences and the first four 'intermediate' sentences from Practice Two.
Hand in transcriptions in class 1/21 (on paper, tones aligned with orthography, no break indices).
Additional reading: Ladd 2.0-2.2.2 and ch.3, available in course box.

 

Schedule

 
  1. Introduction
  2. Tobi and Pierrehumbert's theory of intonation part 1 (Edward)
  3. Tobi and Pierrehumbert's theory of intonation part 1 (Edward)
  4. Phrasing and Break Indices, Pitch range. (Edward)
  5. Focus and Presupposition (Jackendoff, Prince)
  6. Notions of Topic (Reinhart, Lambrecht)
  7. Alternative semantics for Focus (Rooth)
  8. A "compositional" approach (Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, Hobbs)
  9. Information Packaging  in File Change Semantics (Valduvi)
  10. Some recent proposals; Student presentations


 

Literature

(This is a preliminary list, and still under construction.)

Beckman, Mary E. (1996) The parsing of prosody. Warren, Paul (ed.) Prosody and Parsing (Language and Cognitive Processes 11), 17-68.

Beckman, Mary E. and Gayle Ayers Elam (1997)  Guidelines for ToBI Labelling,
version 3. Ms, Ohio State University.

Beckman, Mary E. and Janet Pierrehumbert (1986) Intonational structure in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook 3.

Buring, D., Focus and Topic in a Complex Model of Discourse, ms. UCSC.

Ladd, D. Robert (1996) Intonational Phonology. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge.

Ladd, D. Robert (1994) Constraints on the gradient variability of pitch
range, or, Pitch level 4 lives! , in Keating, Patricia A. Phonological and
Phonetic Form: Papers in Laboratory Phonology 3. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 43-63.

Hayes, Bruce (1994) "Gesture" in prosody: comments on the paper by Ladd.
In Keating, Patricia A. Phonological and Phonetic Form: Papers in Laboratory
Phonology 3. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 64-75.

Hobbs, J., The Pierrehumbert-Hirschberg theory of intonational meaning made simple: Comments on Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg, in Cohen, P., Morgan, J., and Pollack, M. (eds), Intentions in Communication, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Pierrehumbert, Janet (1980) The Phonology and Phonetics of English Intonation. PhD dissertation, MIT.

Pierrehumbert, J. and Hirschberg, J., 1990. ``The meaning of intonational contours in interpretation of discourse'', in Cohen, P., Morgan, J., and Pollack, M. (eds), Intentions in Communication, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Prince, Ellen. (1981) "Towards a Taxonomy of Given-New Information" in Radical Pragmatics (ed Cole) 

Reinhart, T., 1982. ``Pragmatics and Linguistics: An Analysis of Sentence Topics'', Philosophica 27, pp. 53-94

Roberts, C., "Information Structure in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Formal Theory of Pragmatics",
In  Jae-Hak Toon & Andreas Kathol (eds.) Ohio State Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 49, 1996, OSU.

Rooth, Mats, 1992. A theory of focus interpretation, Natural Language Semantics 1, 75-116, 1992

Valduvi, E., 1993. Information Packaging: A Survey, University of Edinburgh.

Valduvi, E., 1994. ``Updates, files and focus-ground'', in van der Sandt, R. and Bosch, P. (eds.), The Proceedings of the IBM/Journal of Semantics Conference on Focus, Vol.3, IBM Heidelberg, pp. 649-658
 

 
A dubious quote from Rosenstock-Huessy:

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say having double meaning.