Intonative Features: A Syntactic Approach to English Intonation 9783110801071, 9789027975362

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JANUA LINGUARUM STUDIA MEMORIAE N I C O L A I V A N WIJK D E D I C A T A edenda curai

C.H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana

University

Series Minor,

139

Intonative Features A Syntactic Approach to English Intonation

Daniel Hirst Université de

Provence

Mouton Publishers The Hague • Paris • New York

Pour Yvette, sans qui ce travail aurait été meilleur mais inachevé.

ISBN 90-279-7536-1

© Copyright 1977 Mouton Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers Printed in The Netherlands

PREFACE

This study is an attempt to deal with intonation, specifically the intonation of British English, not as a physical characteristic of an utterance, but as a complex abstract characteristic which, on the one hand, is determined by a particular type of underlying syntactic structure, and which, on the other hand, contributes to the determination of the ultimate physical shape of the utterance. The role of intonation, it is claimed, can best be described by formulating a number of phonological rules which assign binary intonative features to an utterance, thus reflecting what I refer to as the non-reduced surface structure. From a general point of view, this work may be considered part of an attempt to reconcile the theory of transformational-generative grammar with the data on intonation provided by phoneticians of the British "school". As in all experiments in cross-breeding, the ambition is that the result should inherit the virtues of both sides -1 can only hope that the offspring is not so deformed that both parents would wish to disown it. The publication of this study gives me a much appreciated opportunity of expressing publicly my gratitude and indebtedness to G. Faure who has been relentlessly pointing out the importance of intonation since a time when its study was far less fashionable and respectable than it is today, and whose consistent encouragement and judicious advice prompted me to see this work through to some sort of a conclusion, albeit somewhat a tentative one. This volume is a largely revised version of a thesis presented for a Doctorat de Hie cycle at the Université de Provence under the supervision of G. Faure. I should like to thank the membres du jury, A. Culioli, G. Faure, R. Rivara and M. Rossi for their valuable criticism — where I have not followed their suggestions, I have only myself to blame. My gratitude is also due to all the members of the Institut de Phonétique as well as those of the Département de Linguistique Anglaise of the Université de Provence. In particular I should like to thank M. Ginesy for his help with the article which we wrote together, outlining a first version of some of the ideas expressed here, A. Raphaël and R. Rivara for their time and patience in reading, correcting and discussing the contents of this study, as well as Mme S.

Mariani for her expert typing of various stages of the manuscript in its metamorphosis from English into French and back into English again. My final thanks go to my wife both for having proved a "good secretary" and above all for believing all the time I was right and everyone else wrong. Chapter two was published as "A distinctive feature analysis of English intonation" Linguistics 168 (27-42) and chapter eight as "Emphatic intonation in generative grammar" Studia Phonetica (in press).

CONTENTS

Preface 1. Introduction: the description of intonation 2. Intonative features 3. Other contrasts 4. Stress 5. Boundary 6. Centre 7. Terminal 8. Emphasis 9. Conclusion Bibliography Index

1 28 45 55 75 83 98 114 127 129 134

1. INTRODUCTION

THE DESCRIPTION OF INTONATION

There is no doubt that the development of electronic techniques of acoustic analysis over the last twenty years has been one of the main factors influencing the progress of the phonetic sciences in this period. As far as intonation has been concerned, however, its study has been held back by the fact that the majority of phoneticians have concerned themselves solely with what Chomsky (1964) refers to as "observational adequacy": "A grammar that aims for observational adequacy is concerned merely to give an account of the primary data (e.g. the corpus) that is the input to the acquisition device."(p. 29)

Even such an account can scarcely be considered definitive since, as the most casual examination of almost any intonation research will show, linguists are far from agreeing as to precisely which data is significant and which is not. Mattingly (1966) remarks: "While phonologists agree fairly well about the inventory of segmental phonemes of Southern English, they do not agree about the prosodic features".

Perhaps indeed the introduction of the mechanical analysis of speech into phonetics has had a negative effect on the study of intonation since whereas previously the phonetician was content to rely on his ears, being at once analyst and informant, today the phonetician requires a complex set of machines which produce an enormous quantity of unquantified material which it is then the linguist's task to put into some order. This task, moreover is complicated further by the fact that even such a fairly simple thing as stress, turns out to be an enormously complex affair, depending not only on the by now fairly classic parameters of fundamental frequency, intensity, duration and vowel-quality, but also on the linguist's knowledge of the language as a system. The problem is a fundamental one, and one it seems which no amount of machine analysis can solve. However much we refine our techniques, and improve our apparatus, there remains the basic fact that the final judge is the

2 human ear, and, what is more, the human brain, conditioned since childhood to accept certain combinations of acoustic data as significant and to reject others as being merely individual variants. However much we stress, for example, the final syllable of 1) He wanted it. the Englishman will continue to hear it as unstressed, and usually the analyst will continue to mark it as such. For if he were to hear a stress on this syllable, he would be obliged to reject the utterance as not being well-formed. Indeed as we shall see below, (section 4) pronouns are usually only stressed in English when they are either contrastive or deictic, and in both cases, it is replaced by this or that. Added to this is the important fact that during an act of speech so many extraneous factors come into play that the result is often but a poor reflection of the underlying linguistic competence of the speaker/hearer. The speaker can for example forget what he was speaking about, change his mind in the middle of a sentence, make a mistake, cough, repeat himself, stutter, or manifest particular regional or personal characteristics. In order for a machine to separate the significant data from the non-significant, it would be necessary for the machine to include a model of the speaker's underlying linguistic competence. To reach the same point of maturity that has been reached for example in the study of syntax, the study of intonation needs to get past the acoustic data and to elaborate a theory by which this data can be explained. It needs in other words to attain the level of "descriptive adequacy" and give "a correct account of the linguistic intuition of the native speaker and (specify) the observed data ( . . . ) in terms of significant generalisations that express underlying regularities in the language." (Chomsky, op. cit , p. 28.)

When we attempt to make such generalisations about the facts of intonation a number of questions need to be answered. Before we consider them however we must specify a little more precisely what we mean by "intonation". For the moment we shall rely on a negative definition and shall use the term intonative features to cover all those acoustic features present in a spoken message but which are not included in a phonematic transcription of that message. This definition is then for the moment a purely acoustic one and covers many things which we. shall wish to exclude later on. If we wished to formulate this definition in the framework of generative phonology, we might refer to intonative features as those features of an acoustic signal which are not accounted for in a given list of distinctive features, such as that of Jakobson and Halle (1956) or Chomsky and Halle (1968). Few or none of the linguists studying intonation today, would maintain

3 that intonative features contribute no information at all to .the message. It seems then that the next obvious question to ask must be "What sort of information is contributed by the intonative features? ", and it is here, naturally, that we are likely to find the greatest divergences amongst the linguists. Before we try to analyse some of the possible answers to this question however there is perhaps another, more basic, question to be asked, and that is "Is the information carried by intonative features systematic? " Can it, in other words, be analysed in terms of discrete features which speakers of the language learn along with the syntactic semantic and phonematic systems of their language? Or can we consider intonation as merely a direct, physical manifestation of the speaker's emotions and feelings. In the latter case we should normally expect different languages to use the resources of intonation in very similar, if not exactly the same, ways. What is more, if we were to decide that intonation is not systematic but physical, the study of intonation would no longer be the concern of linguists but would be a branch of psychology. The experience, however, of hearing students who have not achieved a complete mastery of a foreign language (see for example Raphael 1972) seems to point to the fact that the resources of intonation are exploited in different languages in widely different ways. In order to classify the different ways in which we may analyse the information which is carried by intonative features it will be useful to look at what happens during an act of speech, and to try at the same time to elaborate a model which is as comprehensive as possible of the way in which intonation contributes to the information contained in a message. When we perceive a spoken message, we are usually able, if the message is well-formed and in a language which we know, to represent to ourselves the same information which was in the mind of the speaker when he formulated his message. There is, in other words, a transfer of "meaning", by means of certain sounds. We may represent this schematically as: (A)

meaning — s o u n d s

*

meaning.

It seems likely, a priori, that the mechanism which serves to translate "meaning" into "sounds" will be the same as that which translates "sounds" into "meaning". We shall therefore concentrate on the right-hand part of this model, that is: (B)

sounds

>•

meaning.

It is at once evident that in order to go from "sounds" to "meaning" we need something intermediary. The proof of this is given us by the fact that if we perceive a well-formed message in a language which we do not know, we are

4 incapable of understanding the "meaning". The simplest model for explaining this transfer would consist of saying that we have an intermediate level comprising entities which we might call "words". When we know a given language we are able to analyse the spoken message into "words". Each word has a certain "meaning" and this is how we are able to reconstitute the original message. This model, however, does nothing to explain how we translate the "sounds" into "words" nor how we go from the "words" to the "meaning". If we make an acoustic analysis of a spoken message, we find we are confronted with an unqualified acoustic continuum. If we do not know the language, we are incapable of analysing this continuum into words, or even of stating with certitude whether two parts of this continuum are or are not examples of the same word. We need, consequently, an intermediary between the "sounds" and the "words" to help us to explain these facts. What we need in fact is a system whereby the speaker of a language is enabled to break down the unstructured continuum into discrete units. A language which used a system whereby certain acoustic sequences were put into a direct relationship with words would be enormously uneconomic and above all impracticable since this would imply that the speakers of the language would have to learn each word as a separate non-decomposable entity. It is for this reason that we need to postulate a level between the "sounds" and the "words" comprising non-significant but discrete segments, which combine to form the "words". These segments can be further analysed into a number of acoustic features which are in all probability drawn from an "alphabet" of features which is common to all languages. We shall refer to these features in this study as phonematic features. Although at times it will be convenient to refer to the segments which are characterised by these features in which case we shall refer to phonemes. We can say then that according to our model, when we perceive an acoustic signal, we make use of a system which we shall call the phonological component in order to break down the continuum into a number of segments each characterised by a number of phonematic features. Our knowledge of the language then allows us to regroup these segments into significant sequences which we call words. The non-discrete nature of the phenomena which we find on the level of the acoustic signal will be found once more when we consider the level of "meaning". Even if we push our analysis no further than that of words for the moment, we should have to postulate the existence of a system, which we shall call the semantic component, which could explain the passage from the discrete units, the words, to the "masse amorphe et indistincte" which, according to de Saussure (1915), constitutes our thought. For the same reason of economy we have mentioned above when speaking of the sounds, we may postulate that there exists on the level of semantics, discrete units which

5 we may call semantic features, which combine to form words. When the listener has reduced the acoustic signal to a sequence of segments characterised by phonematic features, these features are "translated" into words, by means of a system which we shall call the "lexical component". The output of the lexical component: the words, serves as input to the semantic component, the output of which is the semantic features which are finally put into relationship with the "masse amorphe" of the listener's thoughts. We may thus represent our model schematically: ACOUSTIC CONTINUUM

SEMANTIC CONTINUUM It is evident however, that when we speak we do not use isolated words, but ordered successions of words. In the following sentences, to take an example from French: a) b) c) d) e) f)

Jean mange le tigre. Jean! Mange le tigre! Jean mange le tigre? Jean, le tigre, mange. Jean! Le tigre mange. Jean, le tigre, mange?

6 g) Jean! Le tigre mange? h) Mange Jean le tigre! i) Mange, Jean! Le tigre! j) Mange le tigre, Jean! k) Le tigre, Jean, mange. 1) Le tigre, Jean! Mange! m)Le tigre, Jean, mange? n) Le tigre mange Jean, o) Le tigre mange, Jean, p) Le tigre! Mange, Jean! q) Le tigre mange, Jean? r) Le tigre mange Jean? the same four words are used in different combinations and yet these sentences can by no means be said to have the same meaning. It is the relationships which hold between the words in each sentence which will determine the meaning of the sentences (as well as in some cases the type of sentence - interrogative, negative, affirmative). We need, consequently, a fourth system to account for these relationships. We shall refer to this system as the "syntactic component". The interpretation of a sentence depends on the correct identification of the words of the sentence and of the syntactic structures which link these words together. We may suppose that both the lexical component and the syntactic component serve as an input to the semantic component, which interprets the whole in terms of semantic features. Not all words, however, will serve as a direct input to the semantic component. The word "does" in (2)

John does his work.

will need to be analysed in terms of semantic features, but this will not be true of the "same" word in: (3)

Does John do his work?

On the other hand the word "do" in (3) will presumably have the same analysis as the word "does" in (2). We may postulate that what in fact happens is this: the lexical component receives an input of phonematic features from the phonological component. It establishes correspondences between these features and units, some of which are smaller than the word, which we shall call morphemes. These morphemes are then the output of the lexical component to the syntactic component. At the same time the lexical component distinguishes between syntactic morphemes (like "does" in (3) or the "-s" of "does" in (2)) and lexical morphemes (like "do" in (3) and the "do-" of "does"

7 in (2)). These lexical morphemes serve as output from the lexical component and input to the semantic component. The syntactic component which receives as input the morphemes from the lexical component establishes the syntactic structures underlying the morphemes (largely with the help of the syntactic morphemes but also taking into account word order, etc.). This syntactic information, which we may call syntactic features serves in turn as input to the semantic component where along with the lexical morphemes it is interpreted in terms of semantic features. We can thus give the following model: ACOUSTIC CONTINUUM

acoustic signal phonological component phonematic features

(D)

lexical component morphemes

lexical morphemes

syntactic component syntactic features semantic component semantic features

SEMANTIC CONTINUUM This model, naturally, is still incomplete. We have deliberately left out everything which comes under the heading of intonative features, in order to be

8 able to treat the analysis of these features in the framework of an existing model of what happens when a language user "understands" the meaning of what reaches his ears as an acoustic signal. Before we can do this however we shall need to modify a little our definition of intonative features. We have seen that an act of comprehension can be summarised as the quantifying of an acoustic signal and its interpretation in terms of semantic features, by means of the various components we have described above. There seems no reason to suppose that in as far as intonative features are systematic they do not conform to this general pattern. The intonative features are present in the acoustic signal, and it seems reasonable to postulate that in as far as these features carry systematic information, they serve, directly or indirectly, as input to the semantic component. Our definition of these features was, as we mentioned, purely acoustic. We need, now, to give this definition a functional extension and we shall call, from now on, intonative features everything which, in an acoustic signal, does not serve to establish a phonematic transcription of that signal (does not in other words serve the phonological component to establish the phonematic features), but which does, directly or indirectly serve as an input to the semantic component in order to establish the semantic features of the message. As Denes & Milton-Williams (1962) point out: "Neither an acoustic nor a sensory definition of intonation can be satisfactory because the concept of intonation is used in linguistic analysis, the study of the structure of language, and therefore a definition based on events on the linguistic level is required." (p. 1)

The closest to a workable phonetic definition of intonative features we have seen is that of Lehiste (1969): "Inherent features of a segment are definable without reference to the sequence of segments in which the segment appears. Prosodie features are identified by a comparison of items in a sequence." (p. 3)

This definition however, besides the fact that it would include many factors (such as voice quality) which we would not wish to include under intonative features, would be useless when an utterance consisted, for example, of a single syllable, and yet, as Faure (1970b) points out: "Oh ( . . . ) devient une phrase, immédiatement décodée, dès qu'on l'affecte d e l'intonation appropriée. Et il y a autant de phrases qu'il y a de types d'inflexions: voh,

/oh!

\oh!

\/oh!

etc." (p. 102)

We may assume that the intonative features in so far as we have defined them as being systematic are the output of the phonological component. We must ask to which systems, however, they are an input.

9 If we take the English sentence: (4)

The men can fish.

we may analyse it in two different ways, depending on whether we take the morpheme "can" to be a modal auxiliary (syntactic morpheme) followed by an intransitive verb, or a transitive verb (lexical morpheme) followed by a noun-phrase. In fact, however, the listener will normally have no doubt about which interpretation is the intended one since the two sentences will not be pronounced in the same manner. Even if the word "can" is pronounced with a full vowel /kaen/, the interpretation of it as a modal auxiliary is still possible A phonematic transcription of the sentence then is ambiguous. The listener receives other information to distinguish between [can] 1 (lexical morpheme) and [can] 2 (syntactic morpheme). This information, according to our definition, will necessarily be in the form of intonative features. Since we have said that it is the lexical component which serves to distinguish between syntactic and lexical morphemes, we can state that one input for the intonative features is the lexical component. We find a similar state of affairs if we consider the sentence: (5)

Can you spare me a few minutes?

In this case however, there is no problem as to the identification of the morphemes which make up the sentence. The ambiguity arises from the fact that the sentence can be shown to have two different syntactic structures with, consequently, two different meanings: (5a) Can you ( y spare) y ( N P 1 m e ) ^ ( N p 2 a few minutes) ^ =Can you spare me a few minutes of your time (cf: the non-ambiguous "can you spare me a few pence") (5b) can you ( y spare) y ( N p i me) N p i ( A D y a few minutes) A D y can you spare me for a few minutes, (cf: the non-ambiguous "can you spare your car a few minutes? ") Once more a phonematic transcription is no help in distinguishing the two senses, but in the majority of cases the acoustic signal will not be misinterpreted by the listener. The distinction between a noun-phrase and an adverb phrase is one which will be dealt with by the syntactic component. We may therefore conclude that the intonative features serve as input not only to the lexical component but also to the syntactic component. Finally it seems difficult to treat all the information carried by intonative features in terms of input to the above-mentioned two components. In those

10 cases where we are unable to analyse the information in terms of either syntax or lexis, we shall be obliged to say that we have examples of intonative features with a direct semantic content and which serve as direct input to the semantic component. We therefore propose (E) (see page 11) as our final model of what takes place when a listener interprets an acoustic signal. We may assume that when the mechanism is working in the other direction, when that is, a speaker is producing an utterance, the arrows shown on the diagram are not simply reversed, but the output and input of each component remains constant. Diagram (F) (see page 12) illustrates how this could work. The following example may help to illustrate this model. A native speaker of English hears a spoken message which he analyses, by means of the phonological component into the following information (6)

fta'blaek - bo:d wit / iz - in 6a _ga:dan t bi "loqz ta m a i \ s A n ||.

This information is fed into the lexical component which gives the following analysis: (6a)

the+black+board+which+is+in+the+garden+belongs+to+my+son.

The presence of the intonative feature "stress" on the word "board" identifies the sequence "black board" as meaning "the piece of wood which is black" as opposed to "blackboard". The categorial status of these words is fed into the syntactic component which proceeds to analyse the syntactic structure of the sentence. At the same time the intonative features of the sentence serve to establish that the string "which is in the garden" is a determinative rather than an appositive relative clause, i. e. the relative clause is an essential part of a noun-phrase, telling us which 'black board' is meant, instead of being an accidental comment on its location (See section 6 for an account of the way in which this type of distinction is made). The identity of the morphemes and the syntactic structure which make up the sentence are then fed into the semantic component which, with the help of further intonative information (not specifically portrayed in the example shown) concerning the attitude of the speaker, is then translated into "meaning" in the mind of the listener. It is worth specifying, at this stage, that the fact that figure F shows the semantic component as preceding the syntactic component in no way implies that we are advocating a semantically-based T-G grammar. Figure F describes an act of speech, the performance of a language-speaker. The grammar of a language characterises the competence of a speaker and describes as we have said above the correspondence of sound to meaning in that language. It still

ACOUSTIC CONTINUUM

SEMANTIC CONTINUUM

Model of a listener's interpretation of spoken message.

ACOUSTIC CONTINUUM

SEMANTIC CONTINUUM Model of a speaker's production of a spoken message.

13 seems the most reasonable means of expressing this correspondence to do so by generating from a central component syntactic structures which are then mapped onto semantic and phonetic representations as in the standard theory of T-G grammar (For a discussion of the differences between syntacticallybased and semantically-based grammar see Chomsky 1969). It seems likely that both (E) and (F) are enormously simplified versions of what happens during an act of speech. Since each component is connected with each other component as both input (in one direction) and output (in the other direction) it is probable that there is a constant feedback from one component to another, so that for example not only will the morphemes serve to establish the syntactic features, by means of the syntactic component, but there are also occasions when the syntactic features help to identify the morphemes. The most striking example of this is of course the pun. J. D. O'Connor (1952) gives, for other purposes, a representative example: (7)

I go into the forest with my bow and arrow and quiver. You'd quiver too!

The listener is certainly led on by the semantic features of "bow and arrow" to identify "quiver" as a noun. In the second sentence, however, the structure "You'd too! " is incompatible with this interpretation, and the morpheme is identified as a verb, (with of course very different semantic features). The listener is thus obliged to re-think the first sentence in terms of the knowledge that "quiver" is being used as a verb. Puns, however, represent only a marginal amount of the spoken material which we interpret everyday. Even in normal conversation, however, it is certain that very often we are obliged to rethink a first interpretation of a sentence (often partly established before the sentence is finished) in the light of subsequent semantic, syntactic, lexical or intonative information. We have seen then that according to our model a language-user makes use of four components in order to make the transfer from "sound" to meaning, or vice-versa. We have so far been concerned with merely postulating that intonative features can contribute to the total information of the message in three ways. We have not attempted to analyse the nature of these features. We shall attempt to describe in the remainder of this work both the nature and the function of those intonative features which serve as an input to the lexical and syntactic components. To do this we shall make use of a number of "minimal pairs" of sentences which, as an output from the phonological component in terms of phonematic features appear identical, but which by the time they reach the semantic system are completely distinct. As Pierce (1966) points out.

14 "Since it is impossible for a speaker to use his voice without some degree of stress and tone, this fact makes the requirements for minimal pair distinctions imperative when dealing with the supra-segmental phonemes." (pp. 56-7)

We shall not attempt, in this study, to go any further and to consider those sentences the intonative features of which serve as a direct input to the semantic component. As we shall attempt to demonstrate, however, in a later part of this study, certain intonative features which up to now have been considered as having a direct semantic content can be satisfactorily analysed in terms of the syntactic component. We shall not attempt to give here an exhaustive account of the vast and evergrowing field of intonation studies, (although for a practically exhaustive bibliography see the 3,600 odd titles in Di Cristo 1975). For an account of the development of intonative studies the reader may also be referred to Faure 1962 (pp. 2-35), Crystal 1969 (35-96), or more recently Faure 1973. We shall, however, give a brief account of the way in which the model we outlined in the previous section corresponds to various points of view adopted by writers on intonation. Faure (1973) distinguishes 4 levels of research, namely (i) physiological, (ii) acoustic, (iii) perceptive, (iv) functional. It is of course the fourth of these which we shall be concerned with in this study, with the creation of a "modèle fonctionnel des structures intonatives" (op. cit.). Although few writers on intonation have gone as far as maintaining that intonation has no linguistic function, a certain number of French linguists have come fairly close to doing so. Martinet (1965,1967) for example, claims that pitch variation serves to: "nuancer le discours selon des procédés qui varient peu de langue à langue." (1965, p. 10)

For Martinet, in fact, intonative features are marginal, (p. 29) and in as far as they are meaningful, inform us "non sur l'identité des unités signifiantes, mais, en général, sur l'état d'esprit de celui qui parle." (p. 142)

A similar position is taken by G. Mounin (1968) for whom intonative features are "non-centraux, non nécessaires à la définition spécifique de toute langue"

and by François& François(1967) who, in an article on linguistic ambiguity, claim that:

15 "Les différentes variations intonatives ( . . . ) ne constituent pas une ambiguité linguistique, même si le destinataire hésite, puisque nous ne sommes pas assurés (. . .) qu'à toute variation de l'intonation correspond un choix linguistique obligatoire, les possibilités de choix en ce domaine n'étant pas discrètes, mais, au mieux, polaires." (p. 159)

The vast majority of writers on intonation however, seem to believe that intonation does constitute a system, believe in other words, to use the formula proposed in Faure (1973), that we can isolate "Des unités intonatives localisables sur la chaîne sonore, définissables en termes de marges de dispersion et de seuils et dont la commutation avec un autre trait intonatif entraîne, toutes choses égales d'ailleurs, un changement d'identité du message à quelque niveau que ce soit." (p. 17)

Even Martinet admits (with apparent reluctance) that "l'on ne saurait (. . .) dénier toute valeur linguistique à l'intonation" (1967, p. 84)

and even goes as far as confessing that: "(les variations mélodiques) peuvent sembler parfois jouer un rôle assez central". (1968, p. 10)

As we have tried to show elsewhere (Hirst 1976b) the uncompromising position adopted by Martinet and his followers seems in fact to be the inevitable consequence of his theory of the double articulation of language. For Martinet all human languages are characterised by the fact that they are "doubly articulated" with on one level the unités significatives or monèmes which are composed of unités distinctives ox phonèmes. Every utterance, according to Martinet, can be exhaustively segmented into a finite number of elements of the two types. "tout énoncé s'analyse intégralement en unités des deux ordres". (1965, p. 31)

When we consider intonation, however, we find that the elements of intonation are "comme des signes, des unités à double face qui combinent une expression phonique et un contenu sémantique". (1965, p. 31)

Since according to Martinet the "central" parts of language are those which conform to his theory, it is hardly surprising that intonation should be relagated to the category of "des faits marginaux (. . .) qui, en tout ou partie échappent à ce cadre." (1965, p. 29)

16 It is perhaps natural that Martinet and others should be reluctant to admit that intonative features form a system when we consider that for them the "double articulation" constitutes as G. Mounin puts it "Le trait qui semble distinguer spécifiquement les langues humaines de tous les autres systèmes de communication". (1968)

The origins of this attitude can almost certainly be traced to De Saussure (1916) and his theory of the signe linguistique. As Chomsky (1964) remarks "Modern linguistics is much under the influence of Saussure's conception of language as an inventory of elements ( . . . ) and his preoccupations with the system of elements rather than the system of rules which were the forms of attention in traditional grammar". (p. 23)

And indeed in the Cours de Linguistique Générale there are but few references to the sentence, which obviously in the eyes of De Saussure did not present the real problem, which was rather situated on the level of the word, or at least of the signe. Thus we find "Qu'est-ce qu'une phrase sinon une combinaison de mots? " (p. 147)

Although he seems to admit the necessity of postulating the existence of a "faculté d'association et de coordination qui se manifeste dès qu'il ne s'agit plus de signes isolés" (p. 29)

he seems to believe that this "faculté" is a question of performance and not of competence, that it belongs to parole and not to langue. Thus we find "jusqu'à quel point la phrase appartient-elle à la langue, si elle relève de la parole, elle ne saurait passer pour l'unité linguistique" (p. 148)

and a little further on "la phrase est le type par excellence du syntagme mais elle appartient à la parole et non à la langue", (p. 172)

If we compare Martinet's theory with the model we outlined above we can see that another way of expressing the idea of "double articulation" is to refer to a double quantification. While we cannot claim that intonation is doubly articulated in Martinet's sense, we cannot claim this either for syntactic structures. The notion of quantification on the other hand will apply equally well to intonation as to syntax. We shall attempt to show in the remainder of the study that at least some intonative features can be considered as the phonological

17 representation of certain aspects of syntactic structure. In as far as we succeed in doing this we shall consequently be demonstrating that the facts of intonation are indeed central to language and that, as G. Faure has frequently maintained, they constitute "un système tout aussi cohérent que celui des phonèmes, qui, quel que soit leur prix, et même associés en mots, n'accèdent à la vie que par la mélodie." (1962, p. 356)

Linguists have often described the semantic content of intonation as expressing: "meanings which are superposed on the dictionary meanings of the words." (Jones, 1918, p. 277)

For many writers in fact these "meanings" are specifically the expression of the attitude of the speaker. Thus Pike (1943) states that "an INTONATION MEANING modifies the lexical meaning of a sentence by adding to it the speaker's attitude towards the contents of that sentence." (p. 21)

Danes (1960) qualifies one of the "secondary functions" of intonation as "modal", thus reusing one of the terms originally employed by Schubiger (1935) for whom one of the grammatical relations of intonation is " 'Mood' (i.e. the subjective attitude of the speaker towards his utterance)." (p. 2)

For Crystal (1969) too: "Intonation communicates a meaning independent of (. ..) the inherent lexical/grammatical/segmental 'meaning' of any utterance." (p. 286)

For Crystal, however, the dichotomy grammatical/attitudinal is "fundamentally artificial" (p. 272). Few authors, however, have tried to analyse, systematically and objectively the semantic content of intonation. While this direction of research is beyond the scope of this study we might simply mention two attempts to do this, one on English intonation (Uldall 1960, 1964) and the other on French intonation (Faure 1970, 1971). If studies of this type have a defect, it is that they set up from the outset a number of intonation patterns "intended to cover all the kinds of variations which differentiate intonation contours." (Uldall, 1964, p. 251) "Six schémas intonatifs différents, tous parfaitement naturels, et d'une très grande fréquence dans la conversation courante." (Faure 1972, p. 4)

18 rather than attempting to elaborate a theory of semantic content -and showing which intonative features are pertinent in the expression of this content. As Householder (1957) states with reference to grammatical function: "If we postpone our choice of units until after we have established our grammatical contrasts (. . .) we will arrive at a system ( . . . ) whose units will be much more efficiently used." (p. 237)

Uldall's study also has the disadvantage that it makes no attempt to see whether the semantic content expressed by the contours is a direct result of this content, or is the by-product of grammatical information signalled by the intonative features. Faure's study avoids this danger, to a certain extent, by making use of grammatically incomplete sentences which constitute the sujet, the prédicat of which is expressed by the intonative contour. "Pour prendre un exemple concret: repasser ce concours + schéma intonatif no 3 (surprise) = 'je suis stupéfait que vous me proposiez de repasser ce concours'." (p. 11)

This type of analysis corresponds to some degree to that of Yorio (1973) (see below), constituting a branch of study which is, we believe, complementary to that we are undertaking in this study. We shall maintain, nonetheless, that as far as we can see, an analysis of the syntactic information carried by intonation contours should logically have priority over the analysis of its direct semantic content. An extreme example of the ways in which syntactic and semantic information have sometimes been confused in the past may be seen in Allen's attempt (1954) to explain why "Question-word questions" are normally associated with a falling pitch-movement and "Yes/No questions" with a rising one: "Question-word questions are mainly of an objective character in that they do not ask for or offer an opinion (which is personal) but a fact. But questions made by verb-inversion (do you? can he? etc.) demand 'yes' or 'no' for an answer, and by seeking an opinion are therefore personal in character. So for the former we normally use Tune 1 ( . . . ) and for the latter the normal pattern is with Tune II." (p. 75)

Cf. also Lieberman & Michaels (1962) who refer to "certain 'emotional' moods i. e. as a question, an objective statement, a fearful utterance, a happy utterance." (p. 235)

On the border line between semantic and syntactic uses of intonation is the division of the sentence into: "psychological subject' (. . .) that part of the utterance about which something is e-

19 nounced. . . (and). . . 'psychological predicate' (. . .) that element which is the aim of the speaker to communicate." Schubiger (1935), p. 3.

It should be noted that this analysis is quite distinct from that of Faure (1970) for whom the intonation contour IS the "prédicat", since for Schubiger and others the intonation serves merely to point to the predicate, (cf. Pike (1945) "Pointing" 4 et seq.) This function has, since Schubiger, been described by various writers under various different names: Danes (1960) uses the French terms "Thème" and "Propos" but later (1967) uses the terms "topic" and "comment" and mentions that this corresponds to "the terms 'rheme' + 'theme' used by some Czech scholars". Halliday (1967,1970a) uses the terms "given" and "new" in an apparently similar way, but in 1970b, uses both the pair of terms theme/rheme (which apparently apply to the clause) and "given/new" (which apply to the "information unit"). Chomsky speaks of 'pre-suppositions' in sentences, in an important article (1969) which we discuss more fully below, (p. 28) Rivara (1974) makes use of a similar opposition using the terms pré-supposé/ contenu posé and claims that: "Le profil mélodique des phrases, et précisément leur tonicité, joue un rôle fondamental dans la détermination de la frontière entre posé et pré-supposé." (p. 11)

The concept is obviously a fairly important one in intonation studies, indeed Hubers (1971) takes Crystal (1969) seriously to task for seeming to believe that we can "study intonational phenomena without referring to ( . . . ) topic and comment, . . . In my opinion topic and comment are the most important intonational (accentual) phenomena." (p. 381)

Stockwell (1960) in his review of Schubiger (1958) makes what seems to us a most relevant remark here "Among (the) formatives (on which rules operate to generate sentences) we must include intonation patterns, unless we believe they are all morphophonemically predictable by rules constructed in terms of the non-intonational sequences of formatives. This latter assumption is certainly a possible one but no one has, to my knowledge, succeeded in constructing even a remotely approximate set of rules which will succeed on this assumption." (p. 546)

We shall attempt to show that this point of view is one which merits perhaps greater study than has hitherto been devoted to it. Its importance is obvious: if intonative features can be assigned as a direct result of the underlying struc-

20 ture of the sentences generated by the grammar of the language, then the notions topic/comment are no more necessary as category terms in a theory of intonation than is the notion subject as distinct from the notion Noun Phrase necessary as a category term in a theory of grammar. Indeed both subject/object and topic/comment are functional notions rather than categorical notions and as Chomsky (1965) remarks, the attempt to incorporate functional notions directly into rewriting rules "confuses categorial and functional notions by assigning categorial status to both and thus fails to express the relational character of the functional notions." (p. 6 9 )

Just as it is sufficient to define the relation 'subject o f once and for all as the relation of a string dominated by the symbol NP (noun phrase) to a string dominated by the symbol S (sentence) where the string NP is also directly dominated by the same string S (see Chomsky 1965, pp. 67-71)... so it should be possible to develop a functional definition of the relation topic/comment within the framework of a theory of intonative features. We shall not attempt to do this in this study, but we shall attempt to show that such a theory of intonative features is possible, and, while not suggesting that our study covers the whole field even of the syntactic functions of intonative features, we shall attempt to show that many such functions can be dealt with by our theory. We have seen that the theory of topic/comment, no doubt precisely because of its relational character, is on the borderline of semantic and grammatical description of intonation. Many writers have, however, felt that intonation plays some hard to specify role in determining the grammatical structure of the sentence. Even the most resolutely "attitudinal" writers such as: Jones (1909,1918); Armstrong & Ward (1926); Kingdon (1958b, 1948-9); Allen (1954); Uldall (1960, 1966); O'Connor & Arnold (1961); Stubelius(1962), for example, subdivide the attitudes according to the grammatical categories of the sentences to which the intonation contours apply. The problem, however, is that, as O'Connor and Arnold (1961) point out, "No tone group is used exclusively with this or that sentence-type: question, statement and the like - and also no sentence type requiring the use of one and only one tone group." (p. 3 2 )

The so-called 'question-intonation' particularly has seemed to resist all proofs, statistic or otherwise, that it was as often falling as rising. Fries (1964) remarks: "There seems to be no intonation sequences on questions as a whole that are not also found on other types of utterances and no intonation sequences on other types of utterances that are not found on questions." (p. 2 5 1 )

21 Dominique (1971) points out that despite evidence to the contrary, writers continue to advocate (with some reason we should maintain) teaching that Yes/No questions are pronounced with a rising intonation, and concludes "Nul ne niera l'importance de ces questions dans l'acte de parole, ni leur fréquence. Doit-on continuer à en ignorer leur comportement mélodique? " (p. 80)

Besides the debatable function of determining the type of sentence, Faure (1969,1974) refers to two other functions which also intervene on the "niveau objectif' namely "la fonction démarcative" and "la fonction accentuelle". These two functions serve in fact as supports for the other systems (semantic and syntactic) actualising their content which might otherwise be ambiguous. Cruttenden (1970), however claims that "To put forward such cases as evidence for a grammatical function of intonation seems to involve making an artificial and unilluminating distinction." (p. 184)

and concludes that "All the examples of 'grammatical' as opposed to 'attitudinal' choice turn out to be cases where intonation, in addition to its usual functions, affects the syntactic interpretation of sentences." (p. 191)

One might, however, use the same examples to show that what is often put forward as "attitude" is in fact the expression of an underlying syntactic structure. While agreeing with this author in his refusal to accept a syntactic polyvalence of intonative features, we cannot accept his conclusion, which relies on the fact that ambiguities are not frequent in the language, since this is to forget the extraordinary redundancy characteristic of language, that "les structures^ntactiques et les structures intonatives aboutissent, en combinant leurs effets, à manifester plusieurs fois la même information." (Faure: 1973, p. 12)

One might equally well argue that the affix-s added to a verb in English does not contribute to the information that it has a singular subject, dismissing such otherwise ambiguous sentences as 8) The sheep lives in the field. as being "relatively infrequent occurrences in the language" (Cruttenden, op. cit., p. 184). There is no doubt that many problems are yet to be resolved concerning the analysis of the syntactic information carried by intonative features. Not

22 the least of these problems, is that (to which we shall attempt to give a partial solution) of context. If we attempt to base our analysis on the most explicit theory available: transformational generative grammar, we are faced immediately with the fact that: "This is (at best) a sentence generating grammar which is still unable to specify relations between two sentences." (Stockwdl, 1968a: p. 360)

It has always been a commonplace of intonation studies, and particularly so in the last few years, that a good part of the syntactic information depends on context. Some writers have attempted to develop the study of intonation by proposing the existence of a unit larger than the largest syntactic unit, the sentence, on the one hand; and the largest phonological unit, the tone-group (our phonological phrase) on the other hand. Thus for Trim (1959): "certain tone-groups appear to be nuclear, that is to say their nucleus characterises not so much the group in which it occurs as a sequence as a whole." (p. 27)

Fox (1973) although starting from a different approach ("systemic"; see Halliday (1961, 1967, 1970a)) proposes a similar analysis with a "paratonegroup", his maximum phonological unit, which is further subdivided into an obligatory "major tone-group" and a number of optional "minor tone-groups" in accordance with the pattern: "(minor)

m

major (minor)

"

This analysis, however, interesting though it may be, does nothing to resolve the basic problem that we apparently need a larger syntactic unit. Hultzen (1964) is adamant about the importance of context: "Whatever the unit of language immediately in hand for consideration (. . .) it must be considered as based on utterance and in total context." (p. 85)

Gunter (1973) is of much the same opinion: "The stable, testable meaning of an intonation in the present usage is the manner in which that intonation connccts the response to the context." (p. 199)

This problem, however, is only made more acute by these positions, since whereas we may recognise that the only way in which we can effectively see intonation at work is in "utterance" and in "total context", the grammar of a language cannot account directly for these utterances, but only for the under-

23 lying competence which these utterances reflect. Chomsky in an extremely important article (1970) shows some further serious consequences of this problem of context. According to the "standard theory" of TG grammar (as described in Chomsky (1965) and Katz & Postal (1964)) the meaning of a sentence, its semantic interpretation, is entirely determined by the "deep structure" of the sentence (op. cit. p. 54). The intonation contour is assigned by the phonological component from the surface structure of the sentence (p. 77). Two important features, the focus of the sentence (the syntactic (or semantic? ) equivalent of our intonative feature 'centre') and the presupposition of the sentence seem to be derived from the surface structure rather than from the deep-structure (pp. 70-5). The focus and presupposition seem, however, to have an effect on the semantic interpretation of the sentence. A syntactic structure (£) can give rise to a various number of deep-structures (D). We may represent this as follows: Da Db

Dn Each of these deep structures gives rise to a semantic interpretation (SI) and a number of surface structures (SS), thus for example: SSaa SSab Da

>• SI + SSan

Each surface structure will have its own associated Focus and Presupposition (F, P) which in turn give rise to a semantic interpretation. Thus: SSaa SSab

(F, P) aa (F, P) ab

SSan

(F, P) an

Slaa Slab +

Slan

We then have the anomalous situation that to each sentence is associated two semantic interpretations, one determined by its deep structure Six and one by its surface SIxy. A concrete example of this are the sentences:

24

9a) 9b)

I didn't give the book to JOHN. I didn't give John the BOOK.

The normal non-contrastive intonation will assign the centre (or focus) to, respectively, JOHN and BOOK. The presuppositions (which are formed by replacing the 'focus' by an appropriate variable), will be, respectively: 10a) I gave the book to someone. 10b) I gave John something. The result, then, is that sentences 8a) and 8b), although they seem to have an identical deep-structure, are different in total meaning due to a difference in surface structure. We thus have a circular form of generation which we may represent as follows:

This, however, is unacceptable since according to the standard theory "semantic interpretation" is entirely determined by deep structure. Chomsky suggests the possibility of admitting as the first rule of grammar: S

S',(F,P)

(p. 78)

When the sentence reaches the level of surface structure, if the pair (F, P) determined by the surface structure is not identical to the pair generated from the first rule, a "filtering rule" will block the mechanism and prevent the sentence from being considered well-formed. This mechanism, which Chomsky calls a "notational variant", is evidently merely a way of saying that the surface structure is entirely determined by the deep structure, which makes nonsense of the whole concept of the opposition surface structure/deep structure. Chomsky states: "If we were willing to permit such formal devices then the claim of the standard theory that deep structure fully determines semantic interpretation would be vacuous; if we do not permit them it seems to be false." (p. 79)

25 Chomsky's solution is to reject the Standard theory and in fact to claim that the semantic interpretation is composed of two parts which we may call (1) and (2) with the result that our full derivation is now something like S Sa, (F, P) a, SI2a SSb, (F, P) b, SI2b Dx

-vSIlx SSn, (F, P) n, SI2n

the total semantic interpretation being the sum of SIlx and SI2a for example. The most important part of the semantic information would still however be contained by SIlx. This position, however regrettable, would seem a perfectly logical conclusion if we admit that the pre-supposition and the focus are determined by the surface structure of an utterance. We have attempted to show (Hirst 1974a; 1974b; Hirst & Ginesy 1974; and see section 5 below) that the question of context is crucial to a study of the syntactic information carried by into native features, and that a coherent theory of context will provide solutions to many of the problems which we have just mentioned. We shall outline our approach to such a theory in section 5 below. So far we have discussed various treatments of two of the three types of information which might be said to be carried by intonative features. The third type of information, namely lexical, has received a far less extensive treatment than have the semantic and syntactic information discussed above. We might claim that lexical information is in itself either semantic or syntactic information. This would in fact be the position of the standard theory of transformational generative grammar. The distinction between, for example: 11a) The 'men 'can 'fish, and 1 lb) The 'men can'fish is not between two lexical items can but between a main verb (lexical morpheme) and a modal auxiliary (syntactic morpheme). In so far as lexical information is syntactic, we shall treat this in our study. In so far, however, as lexical information is semantic, it is beyond the scope of this study but deserves mention as a possible parallel branch of research in intonation studies complementary to the one we are undertaking here. We have mentioned above that Faure (1970), analyses the "fonction prédicative" of intonation contours in such phrases as "repasser ce concours",

26 "lui faire des excuses" etc. In a subsequent publication Faure (1971) the theoretical implications of this study are made more explicit. Given a complete sentence of the type 12)

"Je suis surpris que vous me proposiez de repasser ce concours".

Faure analyses the sentence as being the result of an embedding transformation on two kernel sentences: 12a) (=1) vous me proposez de repasser ce concours. 12b) (=2) je suis surpris. Faure then goes on to point out that: "La phrase noyau n° 2 je suis surpris peut être remplacée (et elle l'est presque toujours dans un énoncé spontané) par le modèle intonatif spécifique de la surprise." (p. 4)

Rossi (1972) referring to these articles remarks that: "Ces unités ont un comportement analogue aux entrées lexicales et (. . .) elles sont, en particulier, sujettes comme ces dernières aux restrictions apportées par les règles sélectionnelles." (p. 53)

Yorio (1973) arrives at a similar conclusion from a different direction, the analysis of the so-called "performative verbs" in English. A performative verb is one which does not - describe an action but PERFORMS this action. Thus 13)

He told me to be quiet,

contains an ordinary verb whereas 14)

I tell you to be quiet.

contains a performative. Yorio points out that all performatives must be in the first person singular and in the present tense. Thus far there is nothing particularly surprising in his analysis. Yorio then goes on to claim, however, "Underlying every sentence there is a performative verb that may or may not appear in the surface." (p. 112)

Thus for example 15)

"John isn't here."

27 is a reduction of 16)

(I tell you) John isn't here.

This appears intuitively interesting since (16) is of course the form which reappears very often when we are obliged to repeat something (in anger perhaps) which we are sure the other person understood the first time. Yorio claims that "The overall intonation contours of sentences are derived from the deletion of these performatives." (p. 112)

While feeling that Yorio's claim is certainly excessive it nonetheless remains true that many facts of intonation not accounted for by syntactic features could well be analysed by an approach such as that of Faure or Yorio as described above.

2. INTONATIVE FEATURES

Crystal (1969) remarks that " A p a r t from the basic division of nuclear tones in English into falling and rising, there is only partial agreement in the literature when one compares the inventories of different scholars." (p. 2 1 0 )

The reason for this, as Crystal goes on to point out, stems from the different purposes for which the linguists have developed their analyses. It is evident that there is no theoretical limit to the number of "tones" which we may distinguish in a description of English intonation since even when we restrict ourselves to a single dialect (or even to a single speaker), the number of distinct acoustic documents which we may produce will be dependent only on the sensitivity of our measuring apparatus. The situation would hardly be simpler were we to rely on auditive rests rather than acoustic analysis since all the available evidence seems to point to the fact that the human ear is capable of distinguishing extremely fine variations of fundamental frequency. 1 It seems then that where linguists are in partial agreement at least as to the inventory of the constituent elements of intonation, they are basing their analysis on criteria not of the physical nature of these elements, but of function. It is surprising that American linguists in particular, influenced as they were by the desire to incorporate intonation into the framework of phonemic analysis, did not apply the same rigour of analysis to these phenomena as had been used with success to establish the phonemic inventory of various languages. The only consistent attempt to apply the phonemic principle to intonation which we have come across is that of Pierce (1966) who claims, quite rightly, that: "In order to prove the phonemic status of a given element, for example the difference between the sounds Ipl and /k/ as well as such features as intonation and stress, it is necessary to find two sentences in which the shift of the particular element in question results in a shift in meaning that will be perceived by another speaker of the language." (p. 54)

1 See for example Rossi & Chafcouloff 1972, who establish a threshold for untrained listeners at 6% variation.

29 Pierce, it seems to us, puts his finger on the weakness of the majority of studies of intonation, namely that they do not clearly state the functional basis of their analysis, they do not state clearly, in other words, what for them constitutes a "shift of meaning". We believe, and will try to show below (sections 4-9) that one shift in meaning that can be mapped onto a shift in intonation is a result of a difference in the syntactic surface structure of the sentence in question. We claim that this sort of difference of meaning should logically be analysed before we try to isolate differences of meaning due to such factors as the speaker's attitude etc. . . If we do not do this, we run the risk of analysing as a function of the intonation, contrasts which can be more easily accounted for by the syntac tic component of the grammar. We believe furthermore that such a shift of meaning can most efficiently be mapped onto shifts not of 'phonemes' but of distinctive features which in turn characterise segments and determine the phonetic representation of a sentence. It should be noted in this connection that the distinctive features we attempt to isolate should be considered as abstract entities and that in consequence these features are independent of the various phonetic realisations which they determine and which depend also on various non-functional factors such as geographical origin of the speaker, his age, sex, etc., as well as variations depending on the context of the features in question. These features are assumed to form part of the matrix which underlies phonetic representations of sentences and to be entirely determined by the syntactic surface structure underlying such sentences. Given an alphabet of distinctive features such as that of Jakobson & Halle (1956) or Chomsky & Halle (1968), which are sufficient to account for the lexical contrasts of the language, we may ask next whether we can find minimal pair contrasts normally distinguished by native speakers of the language but which cannot be accounted for by the features of such an alphabet. "Normally distinguished" should here be understood in the sense: mapped onto differing underlying syntactic surface s t r u c t u r e s . 2 Are there, in other words, examples of sentences which have distinct phonetic representations even though the formatives have identical lexical representations. We shall attempt to show that a number of such minimal pairs can be found, and that these minimal pairs necessitate the introduction of a certain 2 We assume that the surface structure which we refer to here is in fact the non-reduced surface which we discuss below (see chapter 6).

30 number of distinctive features which are assigned from the syntactic surface structure of the sentence and which we shall describe with the general term intonative features. The first such feature which we shall describe is that of STRESS. This feature is of course one which requires careful definition owing to a long history of contradictory definitions. We shall denote by the term "stress" an abstract intonative feature which is assigned to formatives of the syntactic surface structure, and which subsequent rules assign to a given syllable or syllables of that formative. We may justify the introduction of this feature by the following ambiguity: 1) he ate a little pudding which has the following interpretations: la) he ate a small pudding lb) he ate a small quantity of pudding depending on whether or not the feature stress is assigned to the formative "little". We shall not attempt to examine the nature of the acoustic clues which serve to signal the presence of this feature in a spoken message but shall assume that a combination of intensity, pitch, syllable length and vowel quality are responsible for this with probably a variation in fundamental frequency serving as the major clue (see Faure, Hirst & Chafcouloff, 1974) although evidence has been proposed to show that acoustic evidence alone is not always sufficient to account for the identification of stress. Lieberman (1965) presented a number of recordings to two linguists (L. Lisker and R. P. Stockwell) who transcribed both pitch-levels and "phonemic stress" using the Trager-Smith system. Before hearing the spoken sentences, the linguists had been asked to transcribe a number of tape-recordings of synthesized speech (all maintaining the temporal pattern of the original spoken sentences, but replacing the phonetic information by a succession of vowels /a/). In the first two recordings: one) only the fundamental frequency of the original recording was reproduced two) both the fundamental frequency and the envelope amplitude of the original recording was reproduced.

Lieberman notes that: "The stress assignments of Linguist B's transcription of tape-recording one . . . differed from his transcriptions of tape recording two only 10 percent of the time." (p. 118)

The minimal pairl) above is sufficient to justify the introduction of an into-

31 native feature stress, which we mark (') in front of the appropriate syllable. Thus we have: 2a) he 'ate a 'little 'pudding 2b) he 'ate a little 'pudding. For the majority of American linguists, there are not two but four or more degrees of stress. Since the American primary stress corresponds to a feature which we shall discuss below under the name of intonation centre, we shall leave aside for the moment oppositions of the type primary/secondary, and examine those cases where the correct identification of a message depends on the distinction between secondary and tertiary stress. We are convinced that Chomsky & Halle's transformational cycle (1968) suffers from the following weaknesses: a) it describes not an acoustic or even a perceptual reality but, as Chomsky & Halle claim, an "ideal stress contour". b) this stress contour is not in fact ideal since for one thing we are obliged to "formulate a principle for interpretation of phonetic representations that nullifies distinctions that go beyond a certain degree of refinement." (Chomsky & Halle 1968, p. 23)

c) some types of syntactic structure will be given the same stress contour by the transformational cycle but can be distinguished by native speakers. d) Finally, it is possible to formulate, more simply, rules assigning one degree of stress, which correspond more closely to the observed acoustic and perceptual reality. We may illustrate these points in the following way. Chomsky & Halle give as example the expressions 2 1 3k 3a) black board- eraser, and 3 1 2 3b) black board eraser corresponding to the meaning difference: 4a) "board-eraser that is black' 4b) "eraser of a black board". While it is possible that this opposition can be distinguished in American English, it seems to us that this is not the case in British English. The question is

32 in any case an empirical one which is amenable to testing. Even if this opposition should prove a possible one, we might suppose that the two instruments mentioned above need cleaning at some time and ask our informants to distinguish between a: 3 1 4 2 5a) black board-eraser cleaner, and a 4 1 3 5b) black board eraser cleaner where the opposition depends uniquely on the correct identification of tertiary/quadrenary stress. Should the informants manage to distinguish these expressions we might then try them with 4 1 5 3 2 6a) black board-eraser cleaner wiper, and 5

1

4

3

2

6b) black board eraser cleaner wiper and so on until we find a point where the informant can no longer distinguish the expressions. Even if we limit ourselves to three formatives, the examples given by Chomsky & Halle are by no means the most complete. The stress contours are assigned in function of two types of internal organisation. Briefly, two consecutive constituents can be dominated either by a lexical category symbol or by another category symbol. In the first case the stronger stress is assigned to the first of the constituents, in the other case it is assigned to the second constituent. If we represent the three formatives by (a), (b), (c), a string dominated by a lexical category symbol by ((a) (b)) for example and a string dominated by a different category symbol by ((a) + (b)), the three consecutive formatives can have the following possible structures: 7i) 7 ii) 7iii) 7iv) 7v) 7vi) 7vii) 7 viii)

((a)((b)(c))) (((a) (b)) (c)) ((a) ((b) + (c))) (((a) + ( b ) ) ( c ) ) ((a) + ( ( b ) ( c ) ) ) ( ( ( a ) ( b ) ) + (c)) (((a) + (b)) + (c)) ((a) + ((b) + (c))).

If the parentheses are not applied in a strictly binary fashion we may also find:

33 7 i x ) ((a) + (b) + (c)) 7 x ) ((a)(b)(c)). Whereas 7 ix) seems a possible structure, 7 x) appears to be ruled out by the syntactic theory. There are consequently nine different types of strings of three formatives, which we may illustrate with the following expressions: 8 0 8 li) 8 iii) 8 iv) 8 v) 8 vi) 8 vii) 8 viii) 8 ix)

(sports (news paper)) 1 3 2 ((waste paper) basket) 1 3 2 (car (mass + production)) 3 1 2 ((internal + combustion) engine) 2 1 3 (electric + (tin opener)) 2 3 1 ((sheep skin) + jacket) 2 3 1 (assistant + (head + master)) 3 2 1 ((stainless + steel) + knife) 2 2 1 (old + wooden + house).

We have been unable to find any single expression capable of being interpreted in these nine different ways but the following expression orange paper box can be analysed in seven different ways which should be sufficient for the demonstration. Thus we may find:

9a)

9b) 9c) 9d)

1 3 2 ((orange paper) box) = a box for orange-papers (i. e. : the papers used to wrap oranges) 3 1 2 ((orange + paper) box) = a box for orange paper. 2 1 3 (orange + (paper box)) = an orange box for paper. 2 3 1 ((orange paper) + box) = a box made of orange- papers.

34

9e) 9f) 9g)

2 3 1 (orange + (paper + box)) = an orange box made of paper. 3 2 1 ((orange + paper) + box) = a box made of orange paper. 2 2 1 (orange + paper + box) = a box which is orange and made of paper.

The oppositions which interest us are those based exclusively on secondary/ tertiary stress, i.e.: 9b/c) on the one hand, 9d/e/f/g) on the other hand. We shall maintain that a simpler and more accurate formulation of the stress rule is to be obtained by considering stress as an all-or-none binary feature characterising each segment of an utterance and assigned from the syntactic surface structure. Specifically we maintain that in a given string, [ + STRESS ] is assigned to the first formative of each sub-string dominated by a lexical category, provided that symbol is not dominated in turn by a lexical category symbol. For the examples given above this will result in the following stress-patterns: 10a) 10b) 10c) lOd) 10e) 10f) lOg)

'orange paper box 'orange 'paper box 'orange'paper'box 'orange paper'box 'orange 'paper 'box 'orange 'paper 'box 'orange 'paper 'box

which corresponds much more accurately to our intuition as a native-speaker than do the stress-patterns in 9a) - 9g). In particular it is to be noted that our formulation is not a mere simplification of Chomsky & Halle's, nullifying distinctions beyond a certain degree. Not only does our formulation give an identical pattern to b) and c) on the one hand and to e), f) and g) on the other hand which are given distinct patterns in 9), but also we give a distinct pattern to d) which under Chomsky & Halle's rules is assigned the same pattern as e). The choice between our formulation and that of Chomsky & Halle is consequently an empirical question. Finally we may note that our conclusion is in agreement with the experimental findings of Liebetman (1965) in the study mentioned above who concludes: "When the linguist heaid the complete speech signal he was able to transcribe four degrees of stress. However, when the linguist heard the fixed vowels that were accurately modulated with the fundamental frequency and amplitude contours of the original speech signal, he was unable to transcribe accurately more than two degrees of stress: stressed or unstressed." (p. 120)

35

An alternative formulation of the concept of stress is proposed by Halliday (1967) following Abercrombie (1964). Halliday postulates the existence of four phonological units: "These are in descending order, tone group, foot, syllable and phoneme." (p. 12)

Each foot contains the element "ictus" followed by an optional element "remiss". The ictus consists of one "salient" (i.e. stressed) syllable, and the remiss of zero or more "weak" (unstressed) syllables. The result of Halliday's (arbitrary) decision that each foot begins with an "ictus" is that when a tonegroup begins in fact with an unstressed syllable, he is obliged to postulate the existence of a 'silent ictus': "Every foot contains the element "ictus" which may however be silent (have zero exponent) if the foot follows a pause or has initial position in the sentence." (p. 12)

Sentence la) given above would consequently be marked: II A he / ate a / little / pudding // and sentence lb): II A he I ate a little / pudding // where ( / / ) indicates the boundary of a tone-group, ( / ) indicates the boundary of a foot, and ( A ) indicates a silent ictus. This introduction of a silent "ictus" seems an unnecessary complication of a linguistic theory, which is necessitated by Halliday's commitment to a linguistic theory based on "levels" and "exponents" (see Halliday: 1961). We have stated above that we shall analyse nothing as intonative features which we cannot justify on syntactic grounds. Since the "foot boundaries" and the "silent ictus" can be automatically determined by the knowledge of the position of the stressed syllable, these categories can have no functional role other than that already implied by the opposition of "stressed"/"unstressed" syllables. We shall consequently continue to refer to "stress" as the significant intonative feature in the examples we have considered, and we shall mark this by a raised apostrophe preceding the syllable which carries the feature stress. Besides the feature [ + STRESS ], we shall need to consider a second intonative feature which is also generally recognised by phoneticians and which goes under such various names as: nucleus (Palmer 1924); inflexion terminate (Faure 1962); primary stress (Katz & Postal 1964); tonic syllable (Halliday 1967); intonation center (Chomsky 1970); contour center (Stockwell 1972);

36 as well as, to a certain extent: primary contour (Pike 1945); accent (Bolinger 1958); ton mélodique (Faure 1948). To justify the introduction of this feature we may consider the following sentence: 11) I thought he was married. This sentence can be interpreted in two distinct ways, corresponding to: 1 la) I thought, (wrongly it now seems), that he was married. 1 lb) He is married as I thought. A phonemic transcription of these two sentences will give the same result: 12)

/ai do : t h i W9 z m ae r i d /

The distinction must consequently be based on the correct identification of an intonative feature. Since we have already identified one such feature, we must test whether this feature will suffice to disambiguate the sentence. At first sight this appears to be the case since we could mark the stresses as follows: 13a) I 'thought he was 'married. 13b) I 'thought he was married. We might compare this, for example, with: 14a) 'Look at that'black'bird. 14b) 'Look at that 'blackbird. which are distinct solely by virtue of the presence or absence of the feature "stress" on the syllable bird. This analysis is unsatisfactory, however, for the following reason: if we take the sentence 14a) and 14b) and add some more words to the sentence, for example: 15)

Look at that black bird sitting on the tree.

we find that the formatives lblack 'bird and 'blackbird are still distinguished by the presence or absence of the feature stress on the formative bird, giving: 15a) 'Look at that 'black 'bird' sitting on the 'tree. 15b) 'Look at that 'blackbird 'sitting on the 'tree.

37 If we now try to do the same thing with sentence 11), expanding it for example to: 16)

I thought he was married to a rich heiress.

We find that the distinction between 1 la) and 1 lb) is not maintained simply by the presence or absence of the feature stress on the formative married, but by the presence or absence of the feature stress on all the formatives which follow thought. If we maintain, in other words, the transcription of 13a) and 13b), we should be obliged to mark: 16a) I 'thought he was 'married to a 'rich 'heiress. 16b) I 'thought he was married to a rich heiress. Since the same thing seems to be true however many words follow the segment "thought", even for example in such sentences as: 17)

I thought he was married to that rich Italian heiress we met six weeks ago at my best friend George's twenty-first birthday party.

and since, above all, there do not appear to be any sentences of the type: 18a) I'thought he was'X'Y 18b) I'thought he was X ' Y where the meaning of the sentences differs in the way that it does for 13a) and 13b), simply by the présence or absence of the feature stress on the formative X, we feel justified in considering the difference one signalled not by the presence or absence of the feature stress on the formatives which follow "thought" but rather by the presence or absence of a different feature on the formative "thought" itself. We shall call this feature CENTRE and will mark it with the symbol (°) in front of the syllable carrying this feature. We shall consequently mark our example in the following way: 19a) I 'thought he was 0 married. 19b) I ° thought he was 'married. The sentences 14a) and 14b) above will now be marked: 20a) 'Look at that'black "bird. 20b) 'Lookat that "blackbird. We have mentioned above that for many, particularly American, linguists,

38

the distinction we have made between stress and centre corresponds, approximately to their distinction between secondary and primary stress. As we have just demonstrated, however, the distinction between stress and centre is not simply a quantitative one but is a qualitative one also. In fact we shall maintain that the intonative features constitute a hierarchy, and that for example (as can be seen from 20) above), the presence of the feature (°) implies automatically the presence of the feature ('). The symbol (°) is consequently a means of expressing the feature-matrix [ + STRESS; + CENTRE; . . . ]. We have so far consistently used the term "sentence" in a sense which now requires some explanation and clearer definition. We have, in a sense, deliberately been begging a certain number of questions in that the term "sentence" has served up to now to describe both a syntactic and a phonological unit. It is evident, however, that there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two units, and that very often indeed the syntactic unit will contain several phonological units. We shall, consequently, from here on distinguish between the two units and reserve the term sentence for the syntactic unit, whereas we shall use the term phonological phrase for the phonological unit which we shall define as a sequence of formatives one and only one of which carries the feature "centre", and the limits of which are determined by the formatives carrying the feature "boundary". The necessity of positing the existence of an intonative feature "boundary" might appear at first sight to be superfluous, since the number of phonological phrases in an utterance is sufficiently determined by the number of centres. Thus the sentence: 21)

It's a good job too.

which can contain either one or two phonological phrases, depending on whether the interpretation corresponds to (respectively): 21a) It's a good thing too. 21b) The job is a good one, too. is sufficiently disambiguated by marking the features stress and centre: 22a) It's a'good 0'job °too. 22b) It's a ' g o o d j o b 0 too. The importance of the feature boundary can be demonstrated however by the following sentence: 23)

She should have phoned her mother was worried.

39 which can correspond to either 23a) She should have phoned. Her mother was worried, or 23b) She should have phoned her. Mother was worried. While these sentences will not always be distinguished by native speakers, it remains part of the language-competence of native-speakers that they can, if they wish, make it clear to their interlocutor the interpretation which they intend. Neither a phonemic transcription: 23c)

/ J i J u d s v f s u n d h a m A

6

awszwArid/

nor the inclusion of the feature stress: 23d) She 'should have' phoned her 'mother was 'worried. nor the marking of the centres 23e) She 'should have "phoned her 'mother was "worried. is sufficient to account for the fact that these sentences are distinguishable. We are consequently obliged to posit the existence of a third feature which we shall mark ( / ) and which we shall refer to as boundary, giving: 24a) I She 'should have "phoned / her 'mother was "worried / 24b) /She 'should have "phoned her / 'mother was "worried / Sentence 21) will now consequently be marked: 25a) It's a 'good 'job "too/ 25b) It's a'good "job / "too/ We have seen that the intonative features centre (") and boundary ( / ) are necessary to a phonological description of English. The feature centre is usually signalled by a pitch-movement within, or starting from, a given syllable. We have not however specified the direction of this pitch-movement. The reason for this is that the syntactic information carried by intonative features is best accounted for if we posit the features centre and boundary independently of the direction of the pitch-movement involved. To illustrate this we may consider the sentences: 26a) I 'Can you'spare me a few " minutes/ 26b) / 'Can you " spare me a few 'minutes/

40 which will normally (though not necessarily) be pronounced with a pitchmovement rising from the syllable which carried the centre. The distinction between the two sentences corresponds to: 27a) Can you give me a few minutes of your time? 27b) Can you let me go for a few minutes? and is independent of the fact that the pitch-movement is a rising one, as can be seen from the following sentences: 28a) /He 'asked if you could 'spare him a few "minutes/ 28b) /He 'asked if you could "spare him a few 'minutes/ where the distinction still corresponds to that of 27a) and 27b) but where the pitch-movement from the syllable carrying the centre is a falling one. In the same way we may demonstrate from the following sentences: 29a) 29b) 30a) 30b)

/She 'should have 0 phoned / her 'mother was ° worried/ /She 'should have "phoned her / 'motherwas "worried/ /'Couldn't she have "phoned / her 'mother was "worried/ /'Couldn't she have "phoned her / 'mother was "worried/

where 29a) and 29b) will normally be spoken with a falling pitch, and 30a) and 30b) will normally be spoken with a rising pitch, that the feature boundary ( / ) is also independent of rising and falling pitch. This does not, however, mean that we consider rising or falling pitch to be insignificant. On the contrary, we consider it one of the major intonative features, but one which must be separated from the features of centre and boundary (cf. Halliday 1967 who distinguishes three systems: "tonality", "tonicity" and "tone"). We can justify the feature signalled by different pitch-movements from the following sentence: 31)

Would you like tea or coffee?

Which can be interpreted as either: 31a) Which would you like? Tea or coffee? or 31b) Would you like tea? or coffee? or something else? If we mark 31) with all features we have established so far: 32)

I 'Would you 'like ° tea/or " coffee/

41 we find that this is not sufficient to account for the distinction. We are thus obliged to posit the existence of a fourth feature to account for this distinction. We mentioned above the fact that intonative features constitute a hierarchy. We may now further this point and maintain that in fact each syllable of a sequence is characterised by a matrix of phonematic features, and equally by a matrix of intonative features of the type [ oc STRESS; 0 CENTRE ; 7 BOUNDARY.. .] where ( a ), (0 ) and (7 ) can take the values (+) or (-), but where certain values of these features can be unmarked since for example [ + CENTRE] implies automatically [ + STRESS]. For this reason, in our transcription we do not need to use a symbol representing the matrix [ - STRESS; - C E N T R E ; . . . ] since this is implied by the absence of the symbols (') or (°) in front of a syllable. In the same way we need only mark the positive value for boundary after the syllable carrying this feature. When we consider the fourth intonative feature, signalled generally by the direction of the pitch-movement between (°) and ( / ) , we come up against a problem of transcription. This feature is equally a binary one, and we shall refer to its two values as TERMINAL and NON-TERMINAL. We may represent this feature by the matrix [ 5 TERMINAL] where (5 ) may be (+) or (—) and we may transcribe [ + BOUNDARY; + TERMINAL] by the symbol (//). We shall however also need to use a symbol to represent the matrix [ + BOUNDARY; - TERMINAL] since otherwise a transcription 33)

/'Would you 'like °tea/or "coffee/

will be ambiguous, since we have no way of telling whether ( / ) represents simply [+ BOUNDARY] or [+ BOUNDARY; - TERMINAL]. For this reason, we shall adopt a further symbol (+) to represent specifically the matrix [ + BOUNDARY; - TERMINAL]. It should however be born in mind that (//) and (+) represent merely the different values of the same feature and not two different features.

42 The example 31) which we gave will now consequently be marked 34a) / 'Would you 'like °tea + o r 0 coffee// 34b) / 'Would you 'like ° tea + or ° coffee + The last feature we shall consider can be exemplified from the following ambiguity: 35)

If you give it to me, I'll mend it.

corresponding to: 35a) Give it to me and I'll mend it for you. 35b) I won't mend it unless you let me keep it. Marking all the intonative features we have established so far is not sufficient to disambiguate the sentence: 36)

I ' If you°give it to me + I ' l l 0 mend it //.

We are led consequently to posit the existence of a fifth feature, which we shall call CONTRAST and which we shall transcribe by the symbol ( _ ) below the syllable carrying this feature. Thus sentence 35) will be marked respectively: 37a) / 'If you "give it to me + I'll °mend it// and 37b) I 'If you "give it to me + I'll °mend it //. In sentences 37a) and 37b) the feature contrast was followed by a non-terminal boundary. To demonstrate that this feature has the same function, independently of the type of boundary which follows, we may consider the following utterance: 38)

She didn't go home because George was there and she didn't go home because Peter was there. She went home because she was tired.

which we may transcribe as follows: 38a) / she 'didn't go 'home because ° George was there + / she 'didn't go 'home because ° Peter was there // / she 'went "home + because she was "tired //. We may contrast the second phonological phrase of the utterance

43 39a) I she 'didn't go 'home because 0 Peter was there// with 39b) / she 'didn't go 'home because "Peter was there// where the opposition corresponds respectively to 40a) She went home but not because Peter was there. 40b) As Peter was there, she didn't go home. We are obliged to take 39a) in the context of 38) since otherwise we should have had the opposition 41a) / she 'didn't go 'home because ° Peter was there + 41b) / she 'didn't go 'home because °Peter was there// corresponding still to 40a) and 40b) respectively, but where the opposition is no longer a direct one : ° _ ) but an indirect one ( // : ° . . . . + ). The following passage gives a sample of our transcription, compared with that outlined for British English by Faure (1948 & 1962) 42a) Is she _ English t or \ French? II v Who? II The " girl - standing - over - there in the Y o u . must be \ joking II She's" not \ English t And she . isn't \ French II \ either II She's I \ talian II

\corner

42b) / 'Is she ° English + or ° French? // I ° Who? H I The 'girl 'standing 'over 'there in the "corner// I You 'must be "joking 11 /She's 'not "English + I and she 'isn't " French// ° either // I she's I" talian// To give a similar transcription for American or Australian English for example, we should need to make quite a few changes to 42a). With 42b) however, the only difference would be that for American and Australian, is in the first sentence would not carry the feature stress since the rule assigning this feature to auxiliaries in Yes/No questions is apparently specific to British English. This indicates a further advantage of a distinctive feature analysis of intonation, namely that it is not, for the most part, specific to a particular dialect of the language in question, as is the case with all other approaches to intonation.

44 We claim then that each segment of the phonetic representation of sentences is characterised by a double matrix of features. The first of these, the phonematic matrix, is assigned in function of the lexical content of the sentence after the application of certain readjustment rules. The second matrix, that concerning intonative features, is of the form (for English): [ a STRESS;/3 CENTRE; 7CONTRAST; 5 BOUNDARY; e TERMINAL].

As we shall attempt to demonstrate, this intonative matrix is determined not by the lexical content of the sentence, but in function of the syntactic structure, specifically the non-reduced surface structure (see section 5 below). We shall also attempt to show that the five intonative features we have described are sufficient to account for all the syntactic ambiguities we have so far come across and which are disambiguated by intonation, including a considerable number of ambiguities which up to now have always been treated from a semantic, "attitudinal" point of view, but which can be handled very effectively within the framework of a transformational-generative grammar.

3. OTHER CONTRASTS

In section two we isolated five distinct intonative features necessary in a phonological description of English. These five features will be all that is necessary to account for all the syntactic functions we shall be looking at in sections 4-9. Before we go on to examine the role played by these features however, it might be worthwhile looking briefly at some of the most obvious omissions from our list of intonative features and to attempt to justify our description which might appear rather limited compared with most descriptions of English intonation. 1 (See page 53) Pike (1945) for example distinguishes 4 levels, 2 ( and sometimes 3) degrees of stress, 2 types of pause, and one primary contour symbol. Trager & Smith (1951) describe 4 stresses, 4 junctures and 4 levels. Kingdon (1958) describes 6 tones (two of which have divided/non-divided variants) with for each tone high/low and normal/emphatic variants, as well as 3 types of unstressed syllables. Faure (1962a) makes uses of 5 registers, 3 tons mélodiques composés and 1 symbole de fin dégroupé which is used to indicate a rise on unstressed syllables. Halliday (1967) has 4 phonological units: each one being subdivided into several categories, 7 types of primary tone (of which 2 are composed, and 4 of which have 2 or 3 secondary variants) and 9 types of secondary systems at pre-head. O'Connor & Arnold (1960), having isolated six nuclear tones, 3 types of head and 2 types of pre-head, remark that of the 72 possible combinations, for practical purposes the analysis can be restricted to 10 types of tone-group. Finally, Crystal (1969) distinguishes 3 simple tones, 4 complex tones (of which 2 are secondary), 5 composite tones, 5 values of simple pitchrange, 3 values of complex pitch-range, 8 types of head (of which 4 falling, 2 rising, 1 falling-rising (falling) (with 3 sub-categories), and 1 rising-falling (rising) 4 types of pre-head, 3 types of onset, 3 values of simple tempo, 2 of complex tempo, and 6 types of stress, not to mention numerous values of rhythm, tension and pause as well as the other 'systems' which Crystal himself qualifies as paralinguistic. We have said that our guiding principle is to analyse as an intonative feature

46 only those features which we can put into direct correspondence with a syntactic ambiguity. It follows necessarily from this that our description of English intonation will be incomplete from a phonetic point of view in two major ways. First of all we have eliminated from our description all those phonetic facts which do not appear to play a distinctive role in the understanding of the message. Secondly we have deliberately passed over various factors which while undoubtedly contributing to the semantic content of the message, do not appear to do so by way of the syntactic component. An example of the first type of omission is an intonation contour which while not extremely frequent in spontaneous conversation yet appears quite commonly in English which is spoken on the radio or in political speeches or other forms of public speaking. Unlike the majority of phonological phrases in British English, this particular pattern contains no pitch-movement but consists rather of a series of static syllables, the centre of the sentence being signalled by a pitch-change up to the syllable carrying the feature centre. Thus we find

The gov

ern

ment has

said

it

will

in crease the old-age pensions.

This type of intonation, however, appears to be nothing but a stylistic variant of the more common rising pitch-movement, as in:

The

gov

ern

ment has

said it

will

in crease the old-age pensions.

where the centre is signalled by a rising pitch-movement, starting from the syllable carrying the feature centre. In our analysis consequently, since we

47 cannot show that this particular pitch-pattern has a syntactic function we shall consider it as a possible realisation of the sentence. 1) /the 'government has 'said it will in'crease the 'old-age "pensions + The pre-central pitch-pattern in British English is usually a succession of variations in pitch, these variations serving as the principal acoustic clue for the identification of stress. The pitch-movement is generally a continuous dropping one (but in the case of a contrastive centre followed by a terminal boundary, this movement is reversed to become a continuously rising one). Sometimes, however, the continuous descending movement is interrupted by an abrupt jump upwards in pitch from one syllable to the next, after which the pitch continues to drop as before. This movement described by Kingdon (1948-9) as "tune broken upwards" (cf. Crystal's "boosters" (1969)) can even be shown to have a syntactic function. In the sentence: 2) I thought I saw the woman from the upstairs flat, which can correspond to either: 2a) When I was looking out of the window in the upstairs flat, I thought I saw the woman, or 2b) I thought I saw the woman who lived in the upstairs flat. If the sentence is said with a pitch-contour dropping regularly from stress to stress until the centre, it remains ambiguous. If it is pronounced with a raised pitch on either upstairs, or woman,

\ 3a) I thought I saw the

woman

from

the

upstairs

flat.

\ 3b) I thought I

saw the woman from the

upstairs flat,

the ambiguity will be lifted and the sentence will be interpreted as 2a) or 2b)

48 respectively. The same effect, however, would be obtained by dividing the sentence into two phonological phrases with the centre occurring respectively on woman or saw, thus: 4a) /I 'thought I 'saw the "woman + from the 'upstairs °flat// 4b) /I 'thought I °saw + the 'woman from the 'upstairs "flat// It seems then that the "tune broken upwards" is nothing more than a variant of a sentence divided into two phonological phrases with a non-terminal boundary occurring after the first centre. In front of a contrastive centre which is followed by a non-terminal boundary, the intonation pattern, in British English, is quite often a succession of falling pitch-movements which serve to signal the presence of the feature stress. An ambiguity which is lifted by this means is illustrated by the following sentences: 5) I she 'might have 'told ° Mary + corresponding to 5a) Perhaps she told Mary. 5b) She should have told Mary. where the ambiguity is lifted by the following patterns:

V 6a) She might have

— 6b) She

\

told

—

might have

Mary

\

V

told Mary

It seems however that what information is carried by this type of pre-central pitch-pattern, contributes directly to the semantic content of the sentence, rather than doing so by the intermediary of the syntactic component. The effect of this modification of the pre-central pitch-pattern corresponds in almost all cases to an attitude of'indignation', or to the addition of the word

49 "really" to the sentence. The proof of this analysis can be seen in the fact that we can imagine a situation where sentence 5) would have interpretation 5a) but could be said with the intonation pattern o f 6b), simply because overriding the grammatical construction there is the addition of the "indignant" value of this pattern. Thus we might find: 7) - 1 thought I told you not to tell anyone. - Well I only told Jane. She wouldn't tell anyone else. - She might have told Mary. For this reason, then, we shall not take this opposition into account, assuming that if we can call this an intonative feature, it is one which is assigned by the semantic component and is consequently beyond the scope of this study. Crystal (1969), discussing the different pitch-movements which have been described by various phoneticians claims: "On the whole there is general agreement about the existence of a low fall, low and high rise, fall-rise and rise-fall." (p. 2 1 1 )

Many studies however, (among them: Jones 1909; Armstrong & Ward 1926; Faure 1948; Allen 1954; Lee 1956a, 1956b, 1956c; Bolinger 1958, 1964; Hultzen 1959; Danes 1960 and Mattingly 1966) ( as well as our own research in this field) make no use at all o f the opposition low rise/high rise. The fact that a number of phoneticians have observed this opposition which we do not follow in this study, requires a certain explanation. The question we must ask is not whether there is a difference between a high rise and a low rise, but whether this difference operates functionally in English. The most common claim is that a low rise indicates an unfinished statement or a statement "nuancée d'implications personnelles" (Faure 1962a, p. 224) whereas a high rise indicates a question. Among the studies of intonation we may distinguish first of all those for whom a rise is merely the conjuncture of two pitch phonemes with, for some, a juncture, or "manner of transition from the preceding part of the utterance to anything that may follow" (Trager & Smith, 1951: p. 46). The studies which adopt this line of approach (for example: Pike 1945; Wells 1945; Trager & Smith 1951 ; Stockwell 1960a; Trager 1961; Pierce 1966) have the disadvantage that, as Householder (1957) points out, even with only four possible pitch phonemes and three terminal junctures, the number of possible pitch-movements is 4 x 4 x 3 = 48, which is of course far in excess of the number required for a functional description of English intonation. Of these writers only Pike, Wells and Pierce seem to consider the question of the function of the different rising pitchmovements. For Pike, none o f the pitch-movements except perhaps (2-1) can be said to be exclusively interrogative. That most commonly found with ques-

50 tions is (3-2) but this "does not determine whether the phrase is a question or is a hesitation form" (p. 53). For Wells on the other hand, all movements ending in pitch phoneme (4) (= Pike's 1) are questions: "As the final phoneme in a sequence it indicates surprised questioning."

Pierce, though taking a similar system as a starting-point, rejects (provisionally) the analysis of three final junctures since, as he claims, there are no convincing minimal pairs to illustrate this difference: "No evidence has'been found to indicate that the difference in degree of rise of pitch made a meaning difference." (p. 68)

Among those studies, however, which are not tied to an analysis of pitchphonemes, for whom the recognition of a pitch-movement is consequently in theory the result of the prior recognition of a difference in meaning, (for example: Jones, 1918; Bloomfield, 1933; Schubiger, 1935, 1958; Mac Carthy, 1956; Kingdon, 1958; O'Connor & Arnold, 1961; Faure, 1962,1964; Hultzen, 1964; Halliday, 1967,1970; Crystal, 1969; Cruttenden, 1970 and Gunter, 1972) we may distinguish four main types of analysis. For the first of these types, the high-rise is essentially the tone of the interrogative form. Thus Bloomfield distinguishes ( i ) lesser rise from (? ) principal rise (interrogative yes-no questions) with also a (,) "a rise of pitch before a pause within a sentence." For Kingdon, too, there is a specific interrogative intonation which he terms///(high rising) as distinct from IL (low rising). IH and IL have apparently a complementary distribution, IH being found only in questions and IL almost never being used for questions (with the exception of alternative questions where IL can occasionally replace IH on all groups except the last. Halliday's two rising tunes 2 (rising to high) and 3 (rising to mid) also appear to be in complementary distribution. Halliday remarks (1970) on the similarity between the two: "The difference, though gradual, is best regarded as phonetic overlap ( . . .) the one being merely lower than the other ( . . . ) But the meanings are fairly distinct. In most instances the speaker is clearly using one or the other; but sometimes one meets an instance which could be either." (p. 21)

Gunter even goes so far as to wish to identify the low-rise with falling tunes (p. 204) but in a footnote quotes Bolinger as saying in a personal communication that "The low-rising contour may sometimes mark questions in which case it fails to contrast with the high-rising contour" (p. 205f).

51 Certain authors have attempted a polysystemic approach to this problem, the contribution of the intonation being different depending on the grammatical structure of the sentence. Halliday (1967) seems to take this point of view in contrast with (1970) (perhaps simplified for the purposes of teaching) stating that: "The grammatical meaning of tone 2, for instance, is quite different if the clause which carries it is declarative in mood from what it is if the clause is interrogative." (p. 19)

The beginnings of such an approach may be seen implicitly in Jones 1918, where he distinguishes for example "yes" said with a low rise, with the meaning "Yes I understand that, please continue" from "yes" said with a high rise with the meaning "Is it really so? " (p. 277) but then marks all other interrogative forms with a low rise (pp. 282-3). For O'Connor & Arnold 1961, Tone Group 7 (= low-rise) is "by far the most common way of asking such (= yes/no) questions. It should be regarded as the normal way." (p. 55)

To turn a statement into a question however, Tone Group 8 (high rise) is needed "as in so many other European languages" (p. 57). When tone-group 8 is applied to sentences with an interrogative form, the effect is to transform them into repeated, echoed or tentative questions. A similar analysis is made by Faure (1962): "Sans qu'on puisse affirmer, en effet, comme on l'a fait parfois, que la montée du médium à l'aigu ( . . . ) intervient presqu'exclusivement dans les questions appelant l'intonation montante, il faut bien reconnaître que la substitution d'un ton ascendant supérieur à un ton ascendant inférieur suffît dans bien des cas, à transformer une affirmation nuancée d'implications personnelles en une question appelant la réponse "oui" ou "non" dans laquelle l'aspect "expressif' se trouve relégué au second plan." (p. 224)

Crystal (1969) too, identifies the normal tone for a question as being a lowrising tone and claims that the substitution of a high-rising tone is sufficient to make "the distinction between an ordinary question as opposed to an echoed or repeated question!', (p. 273)

A third approach to this problem is to use a mono-systemic analysis but to make the opposition not one of "interrogative"/"non-interrogative", but one of "surprise'V'non-surprise". This is of course a development of the position of Wells (1945) described above, and can be found notably in the experimental study described in Faure (1962b):

52 "Lors du passage de 'They — don't think he /knows' à 'They ~~ don't think he 'knows' le décalage d'une demi-octave vers l'aigu du ton infléchi affectant 'knows' (dont l'étendue reste la même pour l'oreille) a pour effet de transformer la phrase en une question colorée de surprise." (p. 76)

The most explicit account of this position, however, is to be found in Cruttenden (1970): "The meaning of a rise ending high which is required to turn 'you're coming' into a question is probably better described as 'surprise'. Questions already signaled by the syntax will not usually have high rise, but low rise or fall (. . .) if such questions do have high rise (. . .) then the element of surprise is added to the question." (p. 188)

The fourth type of analysis is to be found in Hultzen (1964) for whom high and low rises are merely positional variants of what he calls "open intonation" (or elsewhere (1959) "not-low" as opposed to "low"), reflecting a "non-finitive text-shape", (p. 87) It seems probable to us that some combination of the last two analyses would be necessary to a complete description of English. If we consider the following three dialogues: 1) A. What did you have for breakfast? B. Cornflakes, a cup of tea, and some buttered toast. 2) A. A cup of tea? k B. No thanks, I've just had one. 3) A. Would you like a cup of tea? B. A cup of tea? Me? You must be mad! You know very well I don't like tea. all three underlined instances of the expression "a cup of tea" will be spoken with a rising intonation. To explain the difference between the third example and the others we should need to bring into our analysis some such semantic feature as "surprise". Such an analysis is of course beyond the scope of this study since it cannot be accounted for in terms of the syntactic component. The difference between 1) and 2) however can be explained, where it exists, in terms of positional variants in a way similar to that undertaken by Hultzen (op. cit.). None of these variants however seem to us sufficient (in terms of syntactic content) to justify our setting up of two distinct intonative features of rising pitch-movement.

53 NOTE (1) The similarity between our analysis and that of Vanderslice will be obvious (see for example Vanderslice and Ladefoged 1972) although we were unfamiliar with Vanderslice's analysis before completing this study. The difference between our analysis and that of Vanderslice are interesting. His feature [+ Heavy] has no correspondence in our system. The fact that we have been unable to find any minimal pairs distinguished solely by this feature seems to indicate that it should not be introduced as an intonative feature, but as a later phonetic feature. His [+ Accent] corresponds to our [+ Stress] with the exception that in his analysis [Accent] is not conceived of entirely as an abstract feature since for example it is impossible for [+ Accent] to occur after [+ Intonation] in the same "sense-group" (p. 820), whereas in our system it is quite possible for [+ Stress] to occur after [+ Centre] in the same phonological phrase, Vanderslice's [+ Intonation] corresponds to our [+ Centre]. He has, however, nothing corresponding to our [+ Boundary] even though he speaks of "sense-groups" which are presumably delimited by something like this feature. His features [+ cadence] and [+ endglide] are similar to our single feature [+ terminal] with the difference that in his system it is possible to have [+ cadence] and [+ endglide] to account for "fall-rise" intonation, which in our system is accounted for as [+ Contrast] followed by f + boundary.] The fact that we should arrive at a simil ~ terminal J lar analysis independently seems fairly good evidence that we are analysing the same phenomena even though Vanderslice and Ladefoged do not consistently distinguish abstract features from their phonetic correlates.

4. STRESS

We saw in chapter two that the feature stress can serve to distinguish the two sentences: la) He 'ate a 'little' pudding, l b ) He 'ate a little 'pudding. Each of these sentences will be assigned by the syntactic component of the grammar a phrase-marker which can be represented by a tree of the following form:

Det 2a)

3a)

A

I little I

a

pudding

pudding

or, by their exact equivalent, a labelled and bracketed string of the following form:

56 3a

)

(s Det + A +

'A

I

(L

where A is a segment, and L is a lexical category symbol. This type of context-sensitive rule is used formally by Chomsky (1965) where a rule of the type: A

B

/

Z

Y

is used as the exact equivalent of a more clumsy context-independent rule of the type: ZAY

•

ZBY

and where the stroke (/) indicates the context where the rule is to apply, and the dash ( ) the position of the formative in this context. We may now attempt to apply this rule to other ambiguities. If we take the sentence: 6) He showed me certain proofs. it may have two interpretations, corresponding to: 6a) He showed me definite proofs. 6b) He showed me a certain number of proofs. The labelled bracketing of these sentences will give: 7a)

( s ( n p he) fjp + (yp ( y showed) y + i j ^ me) j^pt (NP ( A certain) A + ( N proofs) N ) j ^ ) yp) s

7b)

( s (jsjp he) n p + ( y p ( y showed)y + ( ¡ ^ me) ¡ ^ + NP / / / X ' A Y

Z

where (Z) is as in II (iv), X and Y are strings which may be null but may not contain (/) and where 'A is a stressed formative. There is however a further condition which we must add to II (v), and that is that between ) f j p and the next boundary there must be a stressed syllable; otherwise our rule will produce such impossible sequences as: * 20) / he'gave him / it / we shall consequently develop II (v) to give H(vi)

)Np-..-+)Np/

I

X'AY_

Z'BW/

81

where 'B is a stressed formative and where W is a string (which may be null) and where the other symbols are as for II (v). We have only accounted, however, for the fact that 21a) I he hit the woman/with a stick/ and 22a) / he saw the man/ from the upstairs flat/ are unambiguously interpreted as 18a) and 19a). We have yet to show how: 21b) I he hit / the woman with a stick/ 22b) I he saw / the man from the upstairs flat/ are assigned internal boundaries from the structural description 18b) and 19b) respectively. We have seen that rule II (ii) had as a mirror-image rule II (iii). It seems likely that rule II (iv) also has a mirror-image rule allowing the feature (/) to be assigned before a noun-phrase, under certain conditions which we shall attempt to specify. If we simply formulate our rule as: II (vii) (NP - -"

/ (NP /

/ X'AY

Z'BW /

where all symbols are to be interpreted as for II (vi) the result will be that both 18a) and 18b) above can be assigned features as in 21b) and similarly 19a) and 19b) can be assigned features as in 22b). The only difference, however, between 18a) and 18b) or 19a) and 19b) is the position of the final )jsjp. We shall thus introduce into our rule the condition that an optional internal phrase-boundary can occur at the beginning of a noun-phrase, providing that the end of the noun-phrase is already marked by a phrase boundary; or to be more exact that between and (/) there is no stressed formative. We shall formulate, then, our rule as: Il(viii) ( n p - - - - +

I (NP I

I X'AY

Z'BW^pV/

where V is a segment which may be null and which in any case contains no occurrence of a stressed formative. It should be noted that II (vi) and II (viii) are taken as being sequentially ordered in the order in which they have been presented.

82 If we now apply these two rules successively to 18a) and 18b) we shall have the following possibilities: for 18a: 23a) / he hit the woman with a stick / 24a) / he hit the woman / with a stick / 25 a) I he hit the woman with / a stick / 26a) I he hit / the woman / with a stick / but for 18b) 23b) 24b) 25b) 26b)

/ he hit I he hit I he hit I he hit

the woman with a stick / / the woman with a stick / the woman with / a stick / / the woman with / a stick /

We may thus conclude that if our analysis is correct, 18a and b can give rise to many different variants. Since 23a is identical to 23b, and 25a to 25b there remain for each sentence two unambiguous forms: 24a and b, and 26a and b. Many factors seem to come into play in the division of sentences into phonological phrases but our analysis has at least the advantage that it accounts for all the minimal pairs which we have discovered so far. Perhaps a theory of performance would specify that there is a tendency for phonological phrases to contain for a given rate of speech at least N (or at most N) stressed formatives, but such considerations would take us beyond the limits of this study.

6. CENTRE

We shall see that, for the majority of cases, there will be no difficulty in defining the position of the feature centre, given that our rules have already assigned the features stress, and boundary. The centre must be assigned to one of the formatives already carrying the feature stress, and in fact is usually assigned to the last of these formatives before the boundary. If we now reconsider the ambiguity we discussed in chapters 2 and 5, namely: 1) She should have phoned her mother was worried. the rules we have established so far will assign the features: la) / She 'should have 'phoned / Her 'mother was 'worried / lb) I She 'should have 'phoned her / 'Mother was 'worried /. It will not be difficult to formulate a rule assigning the feature centre to the last stressed formative of each phonological phrase, which will give: 2a) I She 'should have "phoned / Her 'mother was "worried / 2b) / She 'should have "phoned her / 'Mother was worried /. This rule will not, in fact, have to use any of the information contained in the phrase-markers of the sentences. If on the other hand we attempted to assign the feature centre before the feature boundary, we should have had to refer to the phrase-markers for an end-result which would still have been ambiguous: 3) She 'should have "phoned her 'mother was "worried. In order to assign the feature boundary to 3) we should have needed to refer once more to the phrase-markers, and what is more to the same information which allowed us to assign the feature centre. It seems then quite clear that the feature boundary must be assigned

84 before the centre. In order to assign the feature centre, we may formulate as our first approximation the rule: III (0

'A-*

•

°A

/

X/

where 'A represents a stressed formative and where X represents a string which may not contain a stressed formative. If rule III (i) had been sufficient to account for all occurrences of the feature centre, we should not have needed to postulate it independently of the feature boundary. Indeed this feature would in that case have no distinctive value and we should not find minimal pairs distinguished only by the position of this feature. The following ambiguity, however, 4) I thought George was married. (which we mentioned in chapter 2) is proof of the necessity of this feature. Ambiguities of this type have often been quoted to demonstrate the polyvalent or polysystemic nature of the functions of intonation. In the traditional analysis of this feature, the presence of a centre on the formative married implies the pre-supposition 4a) George isn't married. whereas the presence of a centre on the formative thought implies the presupposition: 4b) George is married. Rivara (1974) attempts to draw a parallel between the position of the centre and the "factive" and "anti-factive" use of think (p. 70). As Rivara recognises, however, the distinction factive/anti-factive disappears when we change the verb from think to know. The sentence 5) I knew John was married. for example, does not show any such variation since know is factive whereever we place the centre. Our description will obviously satisfy the criterion of simplicity more satisfactorily if we cannot account for the assignment of the feature centre by a single rule than if we are obliged to propose a whole series of rules whose application is determined by the semantic value of each formative. We shall try to show that the traditional analysis we mentioned above, as well as that of Rivara, is in fact false. In its place we shall propose what seems to us a more

85 satisfactory analysis, and one whose implications reach far beyond the study of intonation. One of the most serious obstacles in the study of intonation comes from the fact that certain facts of intonation, particularly the position of the centre in a sentence, seem to rely on the supra-phrasal context. If we wish our grammar to assign the features by the automatic application of phonological rules, however, we come up against the fact that transformational-generative grammar cannot account for anything longer than the sentence. We could of course arbitrarily modify the grammar and introduce as a first rule P

, S( + P)

where P represents paragraph and S sentence. This however would do nothing to help us since it would not explain how syntactic and phonological constraints can operate over sentence boundaries. Whereas a grammar is quite capable of eliminating the following sentences: 6a) * She went a cup of tea. 6b) * She's English and so does he. and characterising them as not being well-formed, there seems to be no way to do the same thing for the following sequences 7a) Where did she go? A cup of tea. 7b) She's English. So does he. In order to propose a solution to this dilemma, we shall take as starting point one of the basic principles of the "standard" theory of transformational-generative grammar, namely that the semantic interpretation of a sentence is entirely determined by its deep structure. Chomsky seems ready (1970, 1972) to abandon this position but as far as we can see the arguments he presents are not sufficient to justify such a move. A corollary of the principle we mentioned above is that the phonetic representation of a sentence is entirely determined by its surface structure. If we consider on the one hand a sentence like 8) I know. and on the other hand a sentence like 9) I thought he was married. and follow the two principles we have mentioned to their logical conclusion, we must conclude that 8) does not contain sufficient information (out of con-

86 text) for us to reconstruct the deep structure to which it corresponds (and hence its semantic interpretation), and also that 9) does not contain sufficient information out of context, for us to establish its phonetic representation. If we further consider that normally ellipsis can only occur when the information deleted is recoverable, we must conclude that neither 8) nor 9) represent the complete surface structure of the sentences from which they derive. We may suppose that 8) is in fact derived from for example: 10) I know it's Friday. We have just said however that we may not delete information from a sentence unless it is recoverable. If the sentence generated were not 10) but: 11) (§( s l it's Friday) s j + ( s 2 I know it's Friday) s 2 ) s all the conditions would be met for the operation of an ellipsis transforming 11) into: 1 la) It's Friday, I know it is 1 lb) It's Friday, I know. l i b ) now gives us sufficient information to establish the semantic interpretation of the sentence. Similarly if 9) were generated in the form: 12) (g ( s j he's married) s j + ( s 2 I thought he was married)^ )§ we would now have sufficient information to enable us to establish the phonetic representation of the sentence. In fact while 12a) /He's "married / 1 "thought he was 'married / is quite correct, * 12b) /He's "married / 1 'thought he was "married / is unacceptable. If we now consider a sequence of sentences in context, 13) A - George is married. B -1 thought he was married. we can see that 13B) cannot in fact be the complete surface structure of the

87 sentence as it was generated. In the same way: 14)

A - It's Friday today. B -1 know.

14B) cannot be the complete surface structure of the sentence as it was generated. Neither 13B) nor 14B) gives sufficient information, considered by itself, for the derivation of its semantic interpretation, 13B), furthermore does not carry sufficient information for the derivation of its phonetic representation. We shall maintain then that 13B) and 14B) are in fact generated as: 15) (George is married) I thought he was married. 16) (It's Friday) I know it's Friday. 16) can now undergo the ellipsis transformation to become 16a) (It's Friday) I know. Since 15) and 16a) represent respectively the complete surface structures of 13B) and 14B), it follows that 13B) and 14B) must in some way be reduced surface structures. Whereas ellipsis consists of the deletion of an element of a sentence when that element is recoverable from the surface structure, we are claiming that a distinct operation which we call reduction suppresses parts of the complete, or non-reduced, surface structure at the moment when these sentences are actually spoken. Whereas ellipsis, then, is properly a question of competence, reduction seems to be more a question of performance. We shall however still have to modify rule III (i) to account for the fact that the formative married does not receive the centre in the second part of 12a). In fact rule III (i) would require some such modification anyway since even if we did not bring in the concept of non-reduced surface structure, we should have to account for sentences like: 17) He gave her an apple but she didn't want an apple. where the intonative features of 17a) are normal, but those of 17b) are unacceptable: 17a) /He 'gave Her an "apple / she 'didn't °want an 'apple / * 17b) /He 'gave her an "apple / she 'didn't 'want an °apple /. Even without sentences like 9) above then, we need to modify rule III (i) so that in the case of 17) for example the centre is assigned to the formative

88 apple in the first part of the sentence. It seems in fact that what is stopping the feature being assigned to the second occurrence of the formative apple is precisely the fact that this is a second occurrence. There is in other words strict identity between this formative and a formative occurring earlier in the sentence. We can easily demonstrate that strict identity is a proper syntactic notion from the fact that a sentence like 18) John saw John. can be pronominalised to either 18a) John saw him, or 18b) John saw himself. depending on whether or not the two occurrences of John are strictly identical. We can assume then that the identity of noun phrases is indicated in some way in the phrase-marker of the sentence. It will now be fairly easy to formulate a rule which will assign the feature centre to the last stressed formative before each boundary, providing that formative is not strictly identical to a formative occurring earlier in the same sentence: Ill(ii) 'A

•

0

A

/

(SW + B+X+

+Y+B+Z /

where W, X and B represent strings of formatives which may be null, and where Y and Z represent strings which may be null but which may not contain stressed formatives. We can test this rule by applying it to the following sentences: 19a) /He 'gave her an 'apple / she 'didn't 'want an 'apple / 19b) /He 'gave her an 'apple / she 'didn't 'want a 'pear / Rule III (ii) will now correctly assign the feature centre to these sentences giving: 20a) / He 'gave her an "apple / she 'didn't °want an 'apple / 20b) I He 'gave her an "apple / she 'didn't 'want a °pear / Having formulated this rule we can now return to the sentences which we saw earlier: 21a) 11 'thought he was 'married / 21b) / I 'know it's 'Friday/

89 and which had the non-reduced structures: 22a) / He's 'married / 1 'thought he was 'married / 22b) / It's 'Friday / 1 'know it's 'Friday / It is now obvious that if we want our rule to assign the correct features to sentences like this, it must apply not to the reduced surface structure (as in 21) but to the non-reduced surface structure (as in 22). The rule then will correctly assign the features: 23a) I He's "married / 1 "thought he was 'married / 23b) / It's °Friday / 1 "know it's 'Friday / We mentioned above the fact that out of context 21) is ambiguous. We are now in a position to realise that this is because out of context we are unable to reconstruct the non-reduced surface structure of the sentence. In the case of 21a) this will often be that which we have given in 22a), in which case it is true that think is being used in a factive sense. When the same sentence occurs in the context 22) A - George is getting engaged. Bthe non-reduced surface structure will obviously not be that of 22a) but perhaps 25) (George is getting engaged) I thought he was married. The application of the feature assignment rules will give: 26) / 'George is 'getting en°gaged / 1 'thought he was "married / when this sentence occurs in the context 24), the first part of the sentence will be redundant and will consequently be suppressed, leaving 27) / 1 'thought he was "married / In this case it is true to say that the verb think is being used in an anti-factive sense. So far, however, we have not shown that the factive/anti-factive sense of think is independent of the position of the centre. To do this we can consider the context: 28) A - Why did you say George was married?

90 BIf we now imagine our sentence pronounced in this context, it will obviously not have the non-reduced structure of 22a) or 25) but something like: 29) (I said he was married because) I thought he was married, once rule III (ii) has applied to this sentence, we find 30) I I'said he was "married / because I "thought he was 'married / the final output in the context of 28) will consequently be 31) / 1 "thought he was 'married / This is, consequently, identical to the final output of 23a). What, however, is the factive/anti-factive status of think in 31)? If this were determined by the position of the feature centre, we should expect the verb to be factive as in 23a). In fact, however, the verb is obviously anti-factive here. In conclusion, then, the factive/anti-factive use of think does not depend on the position of the feature centre, but on the content of the non-reduced surface structure of the sentence. Strictly, we should say that think is won-factive, since the 'factivity' of the subordinate clause does not depend on the verb but on the rest of the sentence. We have seen, then, that we need to introduce the concept of non-reduced surface structure to account for certain problems concerning the assignment of the feature centre. We have also mentioned that unlike the transformation known as ellipsis, the operation we have called reduction seems to take place during an act of speech and is a matter of performance rather than competence. Usually it is simply a question of not pronouncing a sentence which is obviously redundant in a given context. Unlike the ellipsis transformation, again, the operation of reduction can often be semantically rather than syntactically motivated. If, for example, the sentence we have been looking at is pronounced in the context: 32)

A -1 saw John's wife yesterday. B-

the fact that we find 33a) / 1 "thought he was 'married /, 33b) 11 'thought he was "married /

and not

91 implies that the non-reduced structure of the sentence must be something like 34) (John is married, then) I thought he was married. It is, of course, quite possible for a speaker to actually say the whole of 34) but he may also choose to reduce the sentence and say only 33a). The explanation we have just outlined can give us an insight into a phenomenon described by Lakoff (1972) who compares the sequences: 34a) / 'John 'knows a "woman / 'John a°voids the 'woman / 34b) I 'John 'knows a °woman / 'John a°voids the 'bitch /l^ Lakoff states that in the case of 34b): "We find anaphora even though the anaphoric noun-phrase is not identical to its antecedent." (p. 291)

Berman & Szamosi illustrate the same point with the sequence: 35) I The 'children 'didn't 'want to 'go to t e d / so 'John "scolded the 'bastards /. In terms of the analysis we are proposing, we would claim that in fact 34b) is a reduced version of: 36) / 'John 'knows a "woman / The 'woman is a "bitch / 'John a°voids the 'bitch /. and that 35) is a reduction of 37) / The 'children (who are "bastards) 'didn't 'want to go to "bed / so 'John "scolded the 'bastards./. The 'implied' sentences "the woman is a bitch", "the children are bastards" can be suppressed precisely because the information they carry is recoverable from the intonation of the sentence. To demonstrate even more clearly the role which is played by the feature centre in cases like this, we may consider the following ambiguity: 38) I had had no news from George, so I wrote to my brother, where one of the interpretations implies that 1. In this and future examples we have adapted the transcription to that of our own system in order to facilitate comparison with our examples.

92 39) George is my brother. and the other interpretation does not imply this. When 39) is not implied by 38) we can say that 38) is in fact a non-reduced surface structure and the feature-assignment rules will apply directly to it. When however the sentence implies 39), the rules must apply to a non-reduced surface structure which will be something like 40) I had had no news from George, who is my brother, so I wrote to my brother. which will be assigned the features: 40a) / 1 had had 'no 'news from "George / who is my "brother / so I "wrote to my 'brother. Partly due to the extra-linguistic situation (the person addressed knows very well that 'George' is the speaker's brother) and partly because this information is now recoverable due to the intonation, the sentence "who is my brother" is redundant and is consequently suppressed. The two interpretations of 38) will consequently have the features: 41a) / 1 had had 'no 'news from "George / so I 'wrote to my "brother / 41b) / 1 had had 'no 'news from "George / so I "wrote to my 'brother / We have here, in fact, an interesting example of the complex way in which intonation contributes to the total meaning of the sentence. On the level of deep-structure, these two sentences are of course distinct. Each deep-structure subsequently is associated with a surface structure — still quite distinct. The surface structure is then converted to a phonetic representation and among other things is assigned intonative features. The differing intonative features assigned to the two sentences do not contribute directly to the meaning of the sentences, but merely reflect the syntactic structure. So far there is no ambiguity involved. It is when the speaker comes to say the sentence however, that in the case of 40a) he decides that part of the sentence is redundant and does not need to be spoken, and one of the reasons for this is precisely the fact that the two sentences 41a) and 41b) are phonetically distinct due to the intonation assigned to them. The rule we outlined above III (ii), associated with the concept of nonreduced surface structure, can now be applied to a great number of potentially ambiguous sentences. For example: 42) I said he wouldn't like it.

93 with the interpretations 42a) I expressed the opinion that he wouldn't like it. 42b) I correctly predicted the fact that he wouldn't like it. will have the non-reduced surface structures: 43a) I said he wouldn't like it. 43b) He didn't like it, I said he wouldn't like it. and will be assigned the intonative features: 44a) / 1 'said he 'wouldn't like it / 44b) I He 'didn't like it / 1 °said he 'wouldn't 'like it / Similarly: 45) Do you notice you're getting slimmer? with the interpretations 45a) Do you have the impression you're getting slimmer. 45b) You're getting slimmer. Do you notice it? will have the non-reduced surface structures: 46a) Do you notice you're getting slimmer? 46b) You're getting slimmer, do you notice you're getting slimmer? and will be assigned the features: 47a) I 'Do you 'notice you're 'getting °slimmer?/ 47b) I You're 'getting "slimmer / 'Do you "notice you're 'getting 'slimmer? / A similar analysis can be applied to sentences ending with words like "too". A sentence like: 48) John gave Mary an apple, too. demonstrates very effectively the importance of context in the study of intonation. So far we have been concerned with cases where, each time, one version of the intonation can be considered "marked" and the other "unmarked". We

94 are moreover in a position now to give a strict definition of unmarked intonation as the set of intonative features assigned to a sentence which has not undergone the operation of reduction. Thus in the examples we have just seen, 47a) was the unmarked intonation of 45), 44a) is the unmarked intonation of 42), 41a) is that of 40), etc. In the case of 48) however, we would be hard put to it to say what is the unmarked intonation of this sentence. The presence of too at the end of the sentence is in fact a sure sign that the sentence cannot be the non-reduced surface structure. Once we assign intonative features to the sentence we are able to reconstruct this structure. Thus if the intonation of the sentence is 49a) / 'John 'gave 'Mary an °apple / °too / we know that the suppressed sentence was something like 49b) John gave Mary an orange. If on the other hand the intonation is 50a) / 'John 'gave °Mary an 'apple / °too / we know the suppressed sentence must have been something like: 50b) John gave Alice an apple. More precisely we can state that the syntactic structure of the suppressed sentence in the non-reduced surface structure of 48) must have been: 51a) John gave Mary + (NP) 51b) John gave + (NP) an apple 51c) John + (V) + Mary an apple 5Id) (NP) + gave Mary an apple corresponding to the reduced surface structures: 52a) I 'John 'gave 'Mary an "apple / °too / 52b) I 'John 'gave °Mary an 'apple / °too / 52c) / 'John "gave 'Mary an 'apple / °too / 52d) /^ohn 'gave 'Mary an 'apple / °too / occasionally we find a sentence of this type pronounced as a single group, as if the intonation were

95 ? 53) I 'John 'gave 'Mary an 'apple °too / The interpretation of this sentence however is identical to that of 52d) and we shall therefore assume that it is simply a variant of this sentence. Our rule, then, states simply that the feature centre is assigned to the last stressed formative before a boundary, provided that that formative has not already occurred in the non-reduced surface structure of the sentence. This rule will account for a large number of sentences in English, almost certainly the vast majority. A certain number, however, cannot be accounted for by this rule. Among these we find an important sub-class of sentences like 54) I saw George the other day. where our rule would assign the features: ? 54a) I I'saw 'George the 'other °day / This, however, does not correspond to the expected intonation pattern of this sentence. This is not to say that the centre cannot be on the adverbial expression, but in most cases when we find this, it seems to correspond to an emphatic intonation and as such will be dealt with by the rules we shall be outlining in chapter 8. The normal, unmarked intonation as we defined it above would seem to be: 54b) I I'saw "George the 'other 'day / We shall attempt to provide an explanation for this phenomenon but to do so we shall need to consider a number of other cases which will bring in our fourth feature Terminal and we shall therefore postpone our discussion of this until the next chapter. Apart from sentences with final adverbial phrases, there are a number of other cases which our rule will not account for. Bresnan (1971) considers a number of sentences where the centre is not assigned to the final stressed formative. Many of these are certainly pertinent but her argument that the rule does not apply when the last formative is part of a sentence with a deleted stressed object does not seem to resolve the problem. Indeed she claims that for example 55) / 'Helen 'left directions for 'George to 'follow / is derived from

96 55a) Helen left directions (g for George to follow (directions))^ • By the same reasoning however, the other interpretation of the sentence she quotes with the intonation 56) / 'Helen 'left 'directions for 'George to °follow / ought to be derived from 56a) Helen left directions (g for George to follow (Helen))g which, by Bresnan's rules would result in the same intonation pattern as the first sentence. Bresnan also mentions a further problem with sentences like: 57a) / 'Peter had 'plans for °dinner / 57b) / 'Peter had °clams for 'dinner / but we shall be returning to these in the next chapter (see pp. 108-114). Sentences like: 58a) The "train's 'coming. 58b) The °dog's 'barking. 58c) The "baby's 'crying. 58d) Your "pullover's 'on the 'wrong way 'round. seem to lend support to theories which claim that the function of intonation is to underline, as it were, important elements of new information. As O'Connor has pointed out, however (see Hirst (1975) discussion) counter-examples like 58e) I 'can't come to °night / my "father's 'ill / show a displacing of the centre even though the information carried by "ill" is presumably fairly important. Obviously an ad hoc solution to this problem could be found. It would for example be simple enough to claim that the nonreduced structure of these sentences is something like 59a) (Something's coming) the train's coming. 59b) (Something's barking) the dog's barking. 59c) (Someone's crying) the baby's crying. 59d) (Something's on the wrong way round) your pullover's on the wrong way round. 59e) (Someone's ill) my father's ill.

97 Rule III (ii) would then correctly assign the feature centre to the required formative. There is however a danger that such explanations tend to weaken the value of the concept of non-reduced surface structure to the point where it no longer has any explanatory value. For the moment, it seems preferable to say that a certain number of sentences, proportionally not a very great number, remain unaccounted for, especially since in a lot of cases the intonation pattern which would be assigned by the rules is often as acceptable as the other.

7. TERMINAL

Many of the ambiguities which we shall analyse from a syntactic point of view in this chapter and the next have already been treated by various authors from a semantic, "attitudinal" point of view. As we have already pointed out, however, a study of the semantic content of intonation should logically be preceded by a study of the type we are attempting to outline, since otherwise we shall be analysing the semantic content not only of the intonation, but also of the syntactic features which are signalled by the intonative features. The approach we shall adopt in the following two chapters is a development of the approach which we have already briefly outlined (Hirst & Ginesy; 1974) and which is motivated by the fact that certain syntactic constructions are incompatible with certain intonative features. An example of this is a sentence of the following type: la) Did you see him or not? The formatives of this sentence can carry a variety of intonative features but the final formative "not" must carr) the feature centre, and, what is more, it must be followed by a terminal boundary. If we were to try to analyse the semantic content of these features, treating them as free variants introduced into the phrase-structure of the sentence (as for example Stockwell 1960) we should be obliged to introduce in addition a certain number of constraints which would prevent the feature (+) from applying at the end of la) for example.1 Sentences ending in "or not" however are not the only ones which are incompatible with a non-terminal boundary. The following sentences:

1. The incompatibility of a non-terminal boundary with sentences of this type was first brought home to us by the curious impression given by a recording of T. S. Eliot reading his "The Waste Land" where the sentence "Are you alive or not? " is read precisely with a non-terminal boundary - indicating perhaps that the poet is contemplating a third possibility ("The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading their Own Poetry" Caedmon TC 2006-A).

99 lb) Is he over sixteen or under sixteen? lc) Is he English or foreign? Id) Which one of these two pens do you want?The red one or the blue one? If we examine these sentences, we notice that for each of them we can claim that there is an underlying pre-supposition of the form (Either.. .or...). Thus: 2a) Either you saw him or you didn't (see him). 2b) Either he is under sixteen or he is over sixteen. 2c) Either he is English or he is foreign. 2d) You want one of these two pens: either you want the red one or you want the blue one. If we change sentence 2d), however, to: 3) Which of these three pens do you want? The red one or the blue one or the yellow one? we find that whereas the complete sequence is incompatible with a non-terminal boundary, the sequence "the red one or the blue one" which is phonemically identical with the sequence "the red one or the blue one" in 1 d) differs from it in that it is perfectly compatible with a non-terminal boundary. It seems logical to account for this non-terminal boundary in 3) as a result of the syntactic structure of the complete sentence. Rather, that is, than postulate a semantic feature 'incomplete' which would be carried by the intonative feature non-terminal boundary, it seems preferable to say that the intonative feature is a result of, and consequently signals, the syntactic incompleteness. Many factors point to the probability that all yes/no questions are in fact derived from forms containing alternative questions. Not the least of these is the fact that this means a single formative which we can mark (Q), is present in questions of all forms. (See chapter 4 page 78.) In the case of Yes/No questions like, for example, 4) Did you like it? we should assume that the underlying form is something like: 4a) Q + either you liked it or you didn't like it. An obligatory transformation will convert "Q + either" into whether in the same way that Q + X is converted into "who", "what", "where", "when" etc. ,

100 depending on the syntactic category of X. If the question is embedded in another sentence, the second part of the sentence is either reduced to "or not" or deleted completely, giving for example: 4b) He wants to know whether you liked it (or not). If the sentence is not embedded in another one, whether is deleted giving: 4c) Did you like it or not? As Katz & Postal (1964) point out, the deletion of whether "is a rather recent development of the language ( . . .) at one time yes-no questions beginning with whether did occur", (p. 97)

Indeed we find in the fifteenth century a good example of whether being used in a direct question in direct reported speech: "We! Lorde, quod the gentyle knyght Whether this be the grene chapelle? " ("Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knyght" 2185-6)

This sentence will then be assigned intonative features, giving: 4d) /'Did you like it / or °not / by the rules we have elaborated so far. A further rule will now convert all medial occurrences of / to + and all final occurrences to //, giving: t

4e) /'Did you 'like it + or °not //. This sentence may finally undergo reduction, giving: 4f) /'Did you like it + we need consequently to formulate a rule assigning the feature terminal in the conditions we have just outlined. We can do this quite simply in the following way: IV) X / X/

X+ -X//

/

+Y

where the two rules are strictly ordered and where X and Y represent strings

101 which may not be null. We may now apply this rule and the notions outlined above to the sequence of questions we saw in la - Id. These questions, then will have the underlying forms 5a) Q + either you saw him or you didn't see him. 5b) Q + either he's under sixteen or he's over sixteen. 5c) Q + either he's English or he's foreign. 5d) You want one of these two pens. Q + either you want the red one or you want the blue one. The questions will consequently be assigned the features: 6a) /'Did you °see him?+ (or "didn't you //) 6b) /'Is he 'over six°teen ?+ or "under six'teen // 6c) /'Is he "English + or "foreign // 6d) /'Which one of 'these 'two 'pens do you "want // / The "red one + or the "blue one //. The reduced second part of a yes/no question does not always have to be of the form "or not" as we can see from the examples given above. This means that a sentence like 7) Do you want tea or coffee? is triply ambiguous since its non-reduced surface structure will be either: 7a) Do you want tea, or coffee? 7b) Do you want tea, or coffee (or + NP)? 7c) Do you want tea or coffee (or don't you want tea or coffee)? These three structures will be assigned the following features: 8a) /'Do you 'want "tea + or "coffee // 8b) / 'Do you 'want "tea + or "coffee + or NP // 8c) /'Do you 'want 'tea or "coffee + or "don't you 'want tea or 'coffee //. When these sentences are pronounced in a reduced form, then, the intonation becomes critical for retrieving the non-reduced structure of each sentence since we have: 9a) /'Do you 'want "tea + or "coffee // 9b) /'Do you 'want "tea + or "coffee +

102 9c) /'Do you 'want 'tea or °coffee +. The rule we elaborated for the assignment of the feature terminal will obviously have far wider implications than the few ambiguities it was designed to deal with. Perhaps now we can see how right and how wrong Bodelsen (1943) was when he stated: "Seeing that we can pronounce the same utterance with either Tune I or Tune II, it follows that the choice of tune cannot be the result of mechanical rules relating to the form or meaning of the utterance in the narrower sense." (p. 130)

If, for example, we take a simple sentence of the type: 10) He took off his hat and sat down. we can claim that this sentence will have a non-marked intonation pattern which will be assigned by our rules, namely: 10a) I He 'took off his tiat + and 'sat °down 11 This intonation pattern, however, is not the only one we can find. We might have, for example: 10b) /He 'took off his "hat + and 'sat °down +, or 10c) /He 'took off his liât // and 'sat °down //, or even lOd) /He 'took off his °hat // and 'sat down +. These intonation patterns however are all marked, in that they inform us that the sentence in question is a reduced surface structure. The non-reduced structure corresponding to 12b) would be: 11) He took off his hat and sat down (+ S.) which corresponds to the native speaker's intuition that sentences like 11) reflect incompleteness. This analysis is, in other words, a justification of positions like that of Faure (1962) who stated that: "Nous serions prêts à affirmer que ( . . .) l'intonation montante implique toujours, avec des nuances que nous préciserons, une notion d'inachèvement." (p. 73)

although as we shall see in this chapter, we shall claim that there is one case where a rising intonation does not imply incompleteness. In the case of 10c) the terminal boundary at the end of the first part of the sentence shows that the two sentences must have been generated separately. Since the second sentence is elliptic, however, it must be a reduced form of something like 10). We shall derive 10c), consequently from:

103 12) He took off his hat. (He took off his hat) and sat down. which will be assigned the features: 12a) /He 'took off his °hat // I He 'took off his "hat + and 'sat °down //. This analysis corresponds to the native-speaker's intuition, once more. The second sentence of sequences of this type have often and quite logically been referred to as "afterthoughts". Cf. Kingdon (1958b): " Adjections which aie added at the end of the main sentence usually convey ideas which have occurred to the speaker as he finishes his remark. They are therefore suitably named afterthoughts." (p. 100)

lOd) will now present no problems, being simply a mixture of 10b) and 10c). We shall derive this form from the sequence: 13) He took off his hat. (He took off his hat) and sat down (+ S) which will be assigned the features: 13a) /He 'took off his liat // /He 'took off his "hat + and 'sat "down + S // Our analysis will also help to explain the fact that a native speaker feels intuitively that a rising intonation is the "normal" pattern for a yes-no question, despite the fact that conversation reveals a great number of these questions with falling intonation. In terms of our analysis, 14) Did he tell George? will normally be the reduced form of either 14a) Did he tell George (or not) 14b) Did .he tell George (or NP) and in both cases will consequently be assigned the features: 15) /Did he'tell "George+ . There is, however, nothing to stop 14) being the reduced form of

104 16) (Did he tell Peter or) Did he tell George? which will be assigned the features: 16a) /'Did he 'tell 0 George //. It is perhaps not surprising that a large number of questions like 16a) have been found in corpus-based studies, particularly those using as material radio and television panel-games like "Twenty Questions". We have already tried (Hirst & Ginesy: 1974) to apply a similar analysis to imperatives and WHquestions. In both cases, the unmarked intonation resulting from a direct application of the rules will end with a terminal boundary. Thus: 17a) Sit down. 17b) Where are you going? will be assigned the features: 18a) /'Sit "down // 18b) /'Where are you "going // The pronunciation of such sentences with a non-terminal boundary, then, will be a marked intonation and will be the sign of a reduced structure, the non-reduced form of which could, perhaps, be something like 19a) (Will you) sit down (or not)? 19b) (May I ask) Where are you going (or not)? This sort of analysis seems to capture fairly adequately the semantic value of this sort of question as opposed to the unmarked form. It has though the disadvantage of necessitating the suppression of apparently unrecoverable formatives "Will you" and "May I ask". In the case of imperatives, however, Katz and Postal (1964) have made use of a similar analysis since for them a sentence like 17a) has the same underlying structure as 20) You will sit down. They justify the presence of the pronoun you by the fact that we find 21a) Wash yourself. but not * 21b) Wash herself.

105 Similarly they justify the presence of the modal will by the fact that in tagquestions we find 22a) Sit down, will you. but not (in an imperative sense): * 22b) Sit down, did you? * 22c) Sit down, must she? We might point out that in fact 22a) can be interpreted either as an imperative or as an echoing question "Oh really, you'll sit down, will y o u ? " . For the reasons we have evoked, however, we do not consider this analysis completely satisfactory, particularly in the case of the Wh-questions. We seem, in fact, to be on the borderline of syntax and semantics, a frontier which is desperately in need of further exploration if we are to be able to decide with precision whether a particular phenomena is on one side or the other. One problem which we do seem to be in a position to resolve is that raised by Chomsky (1970) and which we discussed in chapter 1 (pp.28 - 31) concerning the role of presuppositions. Although this question does not directly concern the feature terminal, it does concern our analysis of the non-reduced structure of yes-no questions. For Chomsky, a question like 23) What is John eating? embodies the presupposition 23a) John is eating something, whereas the question 24) When did you tell him I was in London? embodies the presupposition 24a) You told him I was in London at some time. These sentences present no problem in fact since, as we have already mentioned we would analyse them as resulting f r o m 25) Q + John is eating ( N p (D )

^

26) Q + You told him I was in London (Adv-time*9 ) Adv-time'

106 The problem raised by Chomsky does not in fact concern this type of question, but rather the yes-no question. The sentence 27a) Did you give the book to John? will have, presumably, the same deep structure as 27b) Did you give John the book? The unmarked intonation for these two sentences will imply the presence of the feature centre on the last stressed formative. So far our analysis agrees with Chomsky. He goes on, however, to state that these two sentences have different pre-suppositions, which would be: 28a) You gave the book to someone. 28b) You gave John something. In fact, however, as we have already pointed out, most yes-no questions contain a certain degree of ambiguity since 27a) and 28a) are the reduced versions of either 29a) Did you give the book to John (or did you give the book to NP)? 29b) Did you give John the book (or did you give John + NP)? with the underlying form 30a) Q + either you gave the book to John or you gave the book to + NP. 30b) Q + either you gave John the book or you gave John + NP. or else of < 31a) Did you give the book to John (or not)? 31b) Did you give John the book (or not)? with the underlying form 32a) Q + either you gave the book to John or you didn't give the book to John. 32b) Q + either you gave John the book or you didn't give John the book. It is only when 28a) and b) correspond to 29a) and b) that they can be said to have different presuppositions, then, if we define 'presupposition' in the

107 case o f a question as the deep structure of the question minus the question morpheme. In the case of 32a) and 32b) we can in fact assume that both will have an identical underlying form. Since the underlying forms of 29a) and b) are quite distinct, however, we do not need to claim that it is the surface structure of these sentences which is contributing to their semantic interpretation, since the presupposition as we have just defined it is determined entirely by the deep structure of the sentence. At the end of chapter six we mentioned another problem to which we would be returning in this chapter, namely intonation of sentences like: 33) I saw George the other day. If we allow our rules to apply directly to 33) they will assign the features: *

33a) /I 'saw 'George the 'other °day //

The normal intonation o f this sentence however will be either:

\ 34a)

I

saw

George

the

saw

George

the

other

day

or:

34b)

I

other

day

We should consequently expect the features assigned to this sentence to be either: 35a) / I'saw ° George the 'other 'day // or something like 35b) / 1 'saw "George // the 'other °day + The same thing in general seems to apply to almost all adverbials of time. We can even find an ambiguity with the sentence

108 36) I went to Italy once. with the interpretations 36a) I went to Italy only once. 36b) I went to Italy once upon a time. It would of course be possible to limit the applications of the rule assigning the feature centre so that adverbials of time were excluded. This, however, would be to miss a generalisation since this intonation is not confined only to adverbs of time as can be seen from the following ambiguity 37) He gambles unfortunately. with the interpretations 37a) He gambles badly. 37b) He gambles I'm afraid. An interesting point is that in each case the sentence can be disambiguated by placing the adverbial at the beginning of the sentence. Thus 38a) Once I went to Italy. 38b) Unfortunately he gambles. are not ambiguous. When the adverbial can be placed at the beginning of the sentence, it modifies the meaning of the whole sentence whereas in the other case its meaning is limited to the confines of the verb phrase. It is precisely the sentence-modifying adverbials which require a special treatment from the point of view of intonation. Indeed 33) can of course be 39) The other day, I saw George. It is significant that when the adverbials are placed at the beginning of the sentence, the intonation of the sentence no longer presents any problems but is the direct result of the application of the feature rules. Thus 38a) and b) will be assigned the features: 40a) /'Once I 'went to ° Italy // 40b) /Un'fortunately he "gambles //, or 41a) 1°Once +1 'went to "Italy // 41b) /Un° fortunately + he "gambles //

109 and in the same way 39) will be assigned the features: 42a) /The 'other 'day I 'saw George // or 42b) /The 'other °day + I 'saw 0 George //. If we compare the intonation of 42) with that of 35) we see that the two intonation patterns are identical except for the fact that the string the other day has been shifted to the end of the sentence in the case of 35 with the intonative features already marked. The implications of this seem to be that, in any case, the adverbial the other day must be generated at the beginning of the .sentence rather than at the end as has always traditionally been assumed. The same thing will apply in fact to all sentence modifying adverbials. As for the intonation of 42a) and b) (and that of 36 and 37 with sentence modifying adverbials), it seems that the postponing of the adverbials must take place after the intonative features have been assigned. This conclusion is similar to that of Bresnan (1972) who states that certain phonological rules must take place after certain syntactic transformations. Although as we mentioned in the last chapter we do not think her proposed rules will resolve the problems which occur. If the transposition does occur after the assignment of the intonative features, it must be a fairly exceptional rule. Even such superficially similar transformations as that which transforms

43a) John ran away, into 43b) Away ran John. must take place before the assignment of the intonative features since we find (as Berman & Szamosi (1972) point out) 44a) /'John 'ran a°way // 44b) IA 'way 'ran "iohn //. In fact, 35b) cannot be exactly the intonation pattern corresponding to 34b). We should expect 35b) to be realised as:

\ 45)

I

saw

George

—

/ the

other

day

The difference between 35b) and 45) can be seen if we take the following sequence:

110 46) I saw George the other day he was drunk. where we should expect the sequence "the other day" to be realised as in 35b) when the interpretation is 46a) I saw George the other day. He was drunk. and as in 45) when the interpretation is 46b) I saw George. The other day he was drunk. What is more, sentences like 34b) seem to be the only cases where a rising intonation does not imply incompleteness. The intonation of 34b) is the type of falling-rising intonation which Sharp (1958) described as "a binary pattern" and which he symbolises by F + R, as in contrast to the "unitary pattern" symbolised by FR. Sharp points out that "F + R has every bit as much finality as any simple F sentence. . . in other words there is no 'implication'." (p. 140)

For these reasons, then, we propose to transcribe 34b) not as in 35b) but as follows: 47) /I 'saw ° George the 'other °day + // which distinguishes the transcription from that of 45) and which represents by the final terminal boundary the fact that 47) implies a certain degree of finality. The transposition then which postpones the adverbial will be of the form 48) X — (si)

->• (si) — X

/

I

(s

)s.

This will account for the intonation of both 34b) and 34a). Following the application of this rule, our rules will now assign the features as in 47) to 33). 36) with the interpretation 36b) will be assigned the features 49a) / 1 'went to ° Italy 'once // 49b) / I'went to Italy °once + //

, or

37) with the interpretation 37b) will be assigned the features 50a) I he "gambles un'fortunately //, 50b) / he "gambles un° fortunately + //.

or

Ill As for 46), we will now be able to distinguish the two interpretations as, respectively: 51a) / I 'saw "George the 'other °day + // he was "drunk // 51b) 11 'saw °George // the 'other °day + he was °drunk //. Ambiguities like: 52) She'll tell me when he goes on holiday. with the interpretations 52a) She'll tell me the date of his holiday. 53a) When he goes on holiday, she'll tell me (something). will be assigned the features, respectively: 54a) / She'll 'tell me when he 'goes on "holiday // 54b) / She'll °tell me when he 'goes on °holiday + //. The following example will show that rule 48) can also apply even when the final boundary is not a terminal one. 55) Is that the man George asked? with the interpretations 55a) Is that the man whom George asked? 55b) George asked "is that the man?". will have the non-reduced structures 56a) Is that the man George asked or not? 56b) George asked: is that the man or not? which will be assigned the following features: 57a) I 'Is 'that the 'man 'George °asked + or °not // 57b) / 'George "asked + 'is 'that the °man + or not // after reduction and transposition, this will give: 58a) I 'Is 'that the 'man 'George °asked +

112 58b) I 'Is 'that the °man 'George °asked ++. This transposition appears to present a problem when we try to analyse the following sentence: 59) She wanted to see George this morning. with the interpretations 59a) What she wanted, this morning, was to see George. 59b) What she wanted, (yesterday) was to see George this morning. 59a) will, following our line of argument, be generated in the form 60a) This morning she wanted to see George. the other sentence, however, will have the surface structure: 60b) She wanted (j^p (g to see George this morning)^ where the noun phrase is transformed from 60c) (she + AUX see George this morning). We have said, however, that adverbials like "this morning" must be generated at the beginning of the sentence; 60c) will thus have the form 60d) (This morning she + AUX see George) The permutation which converts 60d) to 60c) applies, we have said, after the assignment of the intonative features. If this is the case, there will be no difference in the intonation of the two sentences since in both cases the centre will be assigned to the formative George. The difficulty is in fact only apparent. Whereas the transposition converting 60a) to 59) is optional, that converting 60d) to 60c) is compulsory. We do not find, in other words, * 60e) She wanted this morning to see George. We shall claim therefore that this transformation occurs before the intonative features have been assigned. The features, then, will be assigned to the following structures: 61a) This morning, she wanted to see George.

113 61b) She wanted to see George this morning. giving 62a) / This "morning + she 'wanted to 'see ° George // 62b) I She 'wanted to 'see 'George 'this "morning // 62a) will then undergo transposition, giving: 63) / She 'wanted to 'see ° George 'this °morning + //•

8. EMPHASIS

Undoubtedly one of the biggest advantages of generative grammar over traditional grammar has been that instead of merely listing anomalous facts, generative grammar has attempted to relate these facts to each other "thus reducing a mass of apparent idiosyncracies to underlying regularity." (Chomsky, 1964, p. 36)

A good example of this was Chomsky's analysis of the auxiliary group in English (1957) where he showed that the behaviour of do can be satisfactorily explained by considering it as a "carrier" which is introduced when some element intervenes between an affix and a verb. In this way, negative sentences, questions and emphatic sentences could all be generated by simple rules, and all occurrences of do could be accounted for by a single rule. This account may be contrasted, for example, with that of Bloomfield (1933) for whom sentences with do constitute a "sub-type of full sentences" (1933, p. 174) or with that of Jesperson (1933) who describes: "two means by which the reality of or strength of an assertion is emphasised, namely in the case of auxiliary verbs by using the stressed form with a full vowel, and in the case of all other verbs by a combination with do." (p. 296)

One consequence of the generative analysis then, is that whereas grammarians used to state that "the emphatic form of the verb is conjugated with do" (Eckersley, 1933, p. 54)

it is now generally recognised (even by those who are not disciples of Chomsky) that emphatic sentences with do, does or did are merely special cases of emphatic sentences in general. "Auxiliary do is introduced when there would otherwise be no operator to bear the emphatic stress." (Quirk & Greenbaum, 1973, p. 427)

A result of this is that grammarians are henceforth obliged to include in their

115 alphabet of terminal symbols, a formative 'E' to account for the presence in some sentences of this emphatic stress. I shall attempt to examine here the nature and the status of this formative. Phoneticians have long recognized that in fact there are not one but two types of emphasis, namely emphasis for contrast and emphasis for intensity (Jones, 1918, quotes Coleman, 1912, as the source of this distinction). The sentence 1) I do like your hat. for example is ambiguous and can be shown to have the following equivalents la) It is not true that I don't like your hat. lb) How I like your hat! It is obvious that even though these two meanings can probably be distinguished by means of intonation, the second type of emphasis is probably derived from the first. Jones, in the study we have just mentioned, goes on to say "Contrast emphasis may be applied to almost any word, but intensity emphasis can only be applied to certain words expressing qualities which are measurable, e.g. adjectives such as huge, enormous, lovely (. . .), adverbs such as particularly, extremely, hopelessly, plural nouns such as ( . . .) heaps, tons, hundreds, and a certain number of verbs such as rush, squeeze, hate." (p. 298)

It is interesting that Jones does not consider any examples of what used to be described as the "emphatic form" under the heading of "emphatic intonation", whether for contrast or intensity. Generative grammars, on the other hand, rarely seem to consider any other type of emphasis. As I shall try to show however, ¿n as far as contrastive emphasis is concerned, there does not appear to be any major difference between emphasis applied to a particular formative as in 2) I've read that book. and emphasis which appears to apply to the whole sentence as in 3) I have read that book. The case of 'intensity emphasis' is not quite so clear. When the emphasis applies to a given formative, as Jones points out, the effect is to increase the degree of that formative. This usage seems to be fairly limited and, what is more, the borderline between this and contrastive emphasis is often very

116 difficult to draw. Thus 4) She's beautiful. can be analysed either as the equivalent of 4a) She's very beautiful (intensity) or as implying 4b) Not only she's (+ Adj) but also she's beautiful, (contrast) When however the intensity emphasis applies to the auxiliary group, the sentence can almost always be paraphrased by an exclamative sentence beginning " H o w . . . ! " or " W h a t . . . ! " (depending on whether the word expressing a measurable quality is a noun or an attributive adjective (What. . .) or a predicative adjective, an adverb or a verb (How. . .) ). The following sentences are thus more or less equivalents: 5a) We did have fun! 5b) What fun we had! 6a) That would be a good idea! 6b) What a good idea that would be! 7a) The weather is hot today! 7b) How hot the weather is today! 8a) He does play the banjo well. 8b) How well he plays the banjo! 9a) I do hate wearing a tie! 9b) How I hate wearing a tie! It is perhaps significant that sentence a) of each pair is far more common in English today than sentence b). In any case it seems clear that even when the intensity emphasis applies to the auxiliary group, it emphasises not this group but some word expressing a measurable quality without whose presence in the sentence this sort of emphasis is impossible. The following two sentences both appear unacceptable for the same reason: 10a) * That was slightly interesting. 10b) * How slightly interesting that was! unless of course the emphasis in 10a) is contrastive and not intensive. It seems, then, that the only clear cases of emphasis for intensity which we can find are those where there exists in the sentence a word expressing a meas-

117 urable quality, the contribution of the formative "E" being equivalent to that of the expression "to a great degree". The status of this formative is far from being clear, although unlike contrastive emphasis, we may note that intensive emphasis is incompatible with a negative sentence. Thus 11 a) I don't like wearing a tie. can only be contrastive, an intensive interpretation being as impossible as the 'equivalent' exclamative: 1 lb) * How I don't like wearing a tie! The status of contrastive emphasis is somewhat clearer and I shall try to show that it is best analysed not as a formative generated by the base rules of the grammar, but as an intonative feature assigned from the underlying nonreduced structure of the sentence. If we apply these notions to contrastive emphasis, we find that what we shall be calling contrast corresponds to what British phoneticians refer to as two different intonation patterns. The first of these, when contrast is followed by a terminal boundary, being the equivalent of a "high fall", and the second, when the contrast is followed by a non-terminal boundary being the equivalent of a fall-rise. The analysis of intonation into distinctive intonative features allows us to bring to light the essential identity of the feature contrast in its different occurrences (see Hirst, 1976a). Although phoneticians have disagreed considerably as to the meaning of these intonation patterns, there seems to be general agreement that sentences pronounced with a "fallrise" are in fact sentences with implications. O'Connor & Arnold (1961) give as examples: 12a) Didn't Smith and Jones go? Smith went (but Jones didn't). 12b) Don't books or pictures interest her? Books don't (but pictures do). 12c) I thought you played football. I used to (but alas no longer). 12d) What do you think of my suit? The colour's all right, (but the fit's atrocious) 12e) Must I go by train? You don't have to (but it's much quicker). where the underlined portion corresponds to the sentence carrying the fallrise. O'Connor and Arnold claim that this intonation pattern (their tonegroup 9) expresses an attitude which is for statements: "grudgingly admitting, reluctantly or defensively dissenting, concerned, reproachful, hurt, reserved, tentatively suggesting."

118 To see more clearly the role that such a pattern can have however we may take a fairly neutral sentence where we can be reasonably sure that the attitude we are identifying is not simply a result of the lexical content of the formatives which make up the sentence. If we take the sentence 13) He's a good writer. the 'neutral' intonation for this sentence will be: 13a) I He's a 'good "writer //. We can, however, easily find 14a) I He's a 'good "writer + with a falling-rising intonation on 'writer'. We can also find 14b) He's a "good 'writer + or even 14c) °He's a 'good 'writer +. All three sentences can be said to have implications over and above the meaning of the constituent formatives and the overt syntactic structure of the sentences. If, however, we content ourselves with saying that the difference is a question of the speaker's attitude, we should have a hard job to show that 15a) But he isn't a good painter. can be a possible implication of 14a) but not of 14b) or 14c), whereas: 15b) But he isn't a great writer. can be a possible implication of 14b) but not of 14a) or 14c) and finally that: 15c) But she isn't a good writer. can be a possible implication of 14c) but not of 14a) or 14b). It seems clear that there is a direct connection between sentences of the type 14a) - 14c) and the syntactic structure of sentences 15a) - 15c). We cannot however claim that 15a) -15c) form part of the underlying non-reduced

119 structure of 14a) - 14c) respectively, since to do so would be to allow the suppression of the unrecoverable formatives "painter", "great" and "she". To avoid this, we may claim that the underlying structure of 14 a-c) is: 16a) He's a good writer + he isn't a good + N. 16b) He's a good writer + he isn't a + Adj + writer. 16c) He's a good writer + NP + isn't a good writer. Where the final part of the sentence is very often suppressed since it is usually redundant in the context in which it is spoken. It goes without saying of course that where the unspecified symbols (N), (Adj) and (NP) of 16) are given specific values, and where the subsequent sentence is not suppressed, the first phrase of the sentence is nonetheless assigned the contrastive nucleus as in 14a) - 14c). If we now consider the sentences given in 12) we may see that the implications of these sentences can be represented in a similar way, namely: 17a) Smith went + NP + didn't go. 17b) Books don't interest her + NP + interest her. 17c) I used to play football + I + Aux + not play football. 17d) The colour's alright + NP + isn't alright. 17e) You don't have to go by train + you + Aux + go by train. which in fact correspond very closely to the context given by O'Connor and Arnold (see sentences 12a-e above) with the exception of 17e) which is however reasonably close to the meaning given, if we allow (Aux) to stand for something like "should" or "had better". Before we attempt to elaborate a rule expressing the analysis we have given above, we should point out first of all two important things. In the first place, it is not only the first phrase of the sentence which contains a contrastive centre, but also the second phrase. In each case the contrastive centre occurs on the formative which differs in the two sentences, and which in each case has the same syntactic function, or in other words is dominated by the same category symbol. We may consequently analyse the sentence to which a contrastive centre may be assigned as being of the form: 18) ( s Q l

X +

(Y A )Y + Z >sl

+

(s2 X

+

Y)S1

+

(s2

X;

(Y % ) S 2 ) S

We no longer need to include a string Z in the structural analysis as we did in 18) since we take the (X) of 19) to be, if necessary, a discontinuous string including both the (X) and the (Z) of 18). We now wish to include in 19) the fact that the formative 'not' occurs in one or other of the two constituent sentences but not in both. It seems to us that the most effective way of doing this is to assume that what we have referred to as the morpheme 'not' is simply the negative value of what we might refer to as a 'polarity morpheme' which ranges over the value negative and positive. A justification for this analysis can be seen in the 'minimal sentences' 'yes' and 'no' * where only the morpheme of polarity is apparent and the rest of the sentence is suppressed since it is redundant in the context. When the rest of the sentence is not suppressed, however, this morpheme takes the forms (0 ) (zero morpheme) and (not) respectively. We may thus represent the morpheme of polarity as ( D O j Z ) p o j and ( D O j Z) D 0 j where (Z) and (Z) represent different values of the polarity morpheme, i. e. either negative and affirmative respectively or affirmative and negative respectively. We are now in a position to reformulate 18) to include this polarity morpheme as follows: 20) ( S ( s l X; ( y A ) y ; ( p o l ^ ) p o l ) s l +