Information-Structural Semantics for English Intonation
Studies in linguistics and philosophyPublished 15 December 2006
Mark Steedman
Citations133
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TL;DR
A new semantics for intonation structure is developed, which shares with the earlier versions the property of being fully integrated into Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG, see Steedman 2000b, hereafter SP).
Abstract
Selkirk (1984), Hirschberg and Pierrehumbert (1986), Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990), and the present author, have offered different but related accounts of intonation structure in English and some other languages. These accounts share the assumption that the system of tones identified by Pierrehumbert (1980), as modified by Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988) and Silverman et al. (1992), has as transparent and type-driven a semantics in these languages as do their words and phrases. While the semantics of intonation in English concerns information structure and propositional attitude, rather than the predicate-argument relations and operator-scope relations that are familiar from standard semantics in the spirit of the papers collected as Montague 1974, this information-structural semantics is fully compositional, and can be regarded as a component of the same semantic system.
Keywords
PsychologySocial SciencesArts and Humanities
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