the week of march 24

meaning and intonation

On Wednesday before Spring Break, we started talking about the meaning contributions of intonation. We continued this discussion the next week, and you also did some related lab exercises. Here are the combined slides for the two lectures. And here are the lab exercises you did with your group. We saw that in English, the presence or absence of pitch accents is used to mark the distinction between discourse new and discourse given information. In addition, pitch accents are also used to mark contrastive focus in English. At the end of the second lecture, we also saw examples of pitch accents that do not seem to make any meaning contribution at all, but seem to be there for purely phonological reasons. The division of labor between phonological and semantic/pragmatic pressures for the placement of pitch accents is currently a matter of active investigation.

take-home exam two

Take-home exam 2 was due on Friday, March 28. The main topic of this take-home exam were generalized conversational implicatures, in particular scalar implicatures and their derivation via Horn scales. The derivation of scalar implicatures involves a strength comparison between competing sentences. Sentence A is stronger than sentence B if and only if A logically implies B. A logically implies B if and only if there cannot be a possible situation in which A is true and B is false. The terminology in this area is confusing, but it's well-established terminology, so there is no way around it. We have to carefully distinguish between imply and implication on the one hand, and implicate and implicature on the other.