The Meaning of Intonational Contours in the Interpretation of Discourse.

8/18/2019 The Meaning of Intonational Contours in the Interpretation of Discourse.

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The Meaning of Intonational Contours in the Interpretation of

Discourse.

Janet B. Pierrehumbert and Julia Hirschberg

In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. Pollack, (eds) (1990) Intentions in

Communication, Bradford Books, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. 271-311.

Recent investigations of the contribution that intonation makes to overall utterancand discourse interpretation promise new sources of information for the

investigation of long-time concerns in natural language processing. In Hirschberg

and Pierrehumbert (1986), we proposed that intonational features such as

phrasing , accent placement, pitch range, and tune represent important sources of

information about the attentional and the intentional structures of discourse. In

this paper, we examine the particular contributions of the choice of tune, or

intonational contour, to discourse interpretation. In particular, we propose that aspeaker (S) chooses a particular tune to convey a particular relationship between

an utterance, currently perceived beliefs of a hearer or hearers (H), and anticipate

contributions of subsequent utterances We claim that these relationships are


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The Meaning of Intonational Contours in the Interpretation of Discourse.

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