Meanings of Melodies: Conventional Discourse Effects of English Intonational Tunes

ABSTRACT Intonational tunes systematically affect a wide range of inferences including sentential force, contextual background assumptions, attitudinal meaning, social/interactional meaning, etc. However, analysing their conventional meaning contributions has remained a challenge, in part because many issues remain open regarding how intonational forms, on the one hand, and meanings, on the other, should be represented and analysed. In this paper, we review recent semantic and pragmatic work on English intonation and examine how discussions on these issues are evolving. Offering case studies of a few English tunes and building on the emerging generalizations, we propose that (i) the parsing of intonational form is subject to a variety of considerations including pragmatic ones, that (ii) conventional discourse effects (CDEs) provide useful analytical primitives through which intonational meanings can be captured, and that (iii) this widens the empirical scope of formal semantic/pragmatic analyses to include a variety of social and perlocutionary inferences. We also demonstrate that the explorations of intonational form and intonational meaning are interconnected, often mutually informing each other.