Melodies in context : the semantics and pragmatics of English rising declaratives
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Intonation, in particular, terminal contours, interacts with morphosyntactic features of clause-types (declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, etc.) to help determine the speech act of the utterance and generate complex additional inferences about the context and the speaker. This dissertation addresses the question of how this comes about, focusing on a particular tune + clause-type combination, namely, rising declaratives of American English. English rising declaratives have been associated with a wide range of seemingly disparate meanings. They may be used as tentative assertions (the so-called 'uptalk' uses, often accompanied by social stigma), and they may be used as biased questions. In the latter case, they can sometimes convey positive epistemic bias of the speaker, but other times may convey negative epistemic bias instead. They often convey particular interactional and social meanings, like speaker politeness, but may also convey opposite social meanings, like speaker annoyance or exasperation. Characterizing the core, conventional effect of rising declaratives that crosscuts all of these varied uses has been a challenge. This dissertation presents a series of experimental studies and a theoretical analysis that reconcile these disparate, potentially conflicting observations that have been made about English rising declaratives data. It establishes the existence of two distinct types of rising declaratives, and derives additional, enriched meanings from the conventional effects of these two clause-types and their interactions with context and pragmatic reasoning.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Jeong, Sunwoo |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Condoravdi, Cleo A, 1962- |
| Degree supervisor | Potts, Christopher, 1977- |
| Thesis advisor | Condoravdi, Cleo A, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Potts, Christopher, 1977- |
| Thesis advisor | Podesva, Robert |
| Thesis advisor | Sumner, Meghan |
| Degree committee member | Podesva, Robert |
| Degree committee member | Sumner, Meghan |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Sunwoo Jeong. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Sunwoo Jeong
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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