The Meaning of Intonational Contours in the Interpretation of Discourse

Abstract

Recent investigations of the contribution that intonation makes to overall utterance and discourse interpretation promise new sources of information for the investigation of long-time concerns in NLP. In Hirschberg & Pierrehumber 1986 we proposed that intonational features such as phrasing, accent placement, pitch range, and tune represent important sources of information about the attentional and intentional structures of discourse. In this paper we examine the particular contribution of choice of tune, or intonational contour, to discourse interpretation.