From the Prosody of Discourse to intonational Meaning in Dialogue(s)

Overview & Synopsis

Even if it is less controversial today than it used to be that intonation is part of the grammar of languages, it is still a challenge and a major issue to define what the primitives of intonational analysis are and how they contribute to the meaning of the utterance. My research defends the idea of the ‘linguistic normality’ of intonation and intonational meaning by attempting to identify its specificity. I defend the double articulation of intonational patterns into meaning-carrying units (pitch accents and boundary tones), which can themselves be broken down into meaningless units (tones). I argue that the meaning of intonation reflects the intimately dialogical and interactional dimension of language in several respects: 1) it indicates which parts of the utterance refer to the knowledge shared by the interlocutors or to the specific issue at stake in the utterance; 2) it indicates how the speaker assumes or attributes to the interlocutor the knowledge and beliefs brought into play by the situation evoked by the utterance; 3) it suggests the form that the following utterance could or should take, its source and its potential relations with the utterance in progress.