13 October 2000, DIP Colloquium

13 October 2000, DIP Colloquium
Title: Prosody and Meaning: Two Case Studies
Speaker: Emiel Krahmer
Location: MFR, Philosophy department, ground flour
Date and Time: Friday 13th October 2000, 15.00-17.00

Abstract:
In this talk a methodological approach to the study of meaning and intonation is outlined. This approach focusses both on what speakers can produce (using production experiments) and on what hearers can perceive (using perception experiments). It is shown that such an experimental paradigm can yield interesting results from a semantical point of view by discussing two specific cases: contrastive accent and meta-linguistic negation. Concerning contrastive accents, we argue against the existence of a seperately identifiable accent with a contrastive interpretation, but a contrastive intonation contour does appear to exist. We argue that this contour triggers a presupposition, which may be resolved using van der Sandt's theory of presuppositions. We also present empirical evidence for the existence of a set of prosodic differences between meta-linguistic negations and descriptive negations, a distinction which is the subject of considerable debate in presupposition theory. Finally, we argue that prosody gives rise to soft constraints, and point out that an optimality theoretic framework may be suitable to model the relation between prosody and meaning. In the discussion we outline some problems and prospects for such an account.

For more information, see ftp://ftp.let.uu.nl/pub/colibri/logic/dutch/dip.39-2000.