Prosodic constraints on pragmatic interpretation: a new chapter in linguistic pragmatics
-
Mélanie Petit
,
François Nemo
Abstract
This paper introduces the importance of prosodic constraints on interpretation in the understanding of the semantic/pragmatic interface and the linguistic marking and lexicalization of pragmatic meanings. It addresses this issue at word and utterance levels, after defining the notions of non-structural prosody and free lexical prosody. At word level, it shows the existence of a prosodic polysemy which lexicalizes into word lexical meanings that include pragmatic orientation, and that prosodic contours/features introduce prosodic comments, typically about the speaker’s position toward what is at stake but also about the hearer’s expected reaction to this position, forcing their description to be polyphonic. Similarly, at utterance level, it is shown that prosodic comments also occur, and moreover that the scope of such comments is often not the “sentential” meaning. The last section is dedicated to the description of the methodology and techniques used in existing programs to allow the automated discrimination of prosodic forms, and a reliable mapping of prosodic forms with interpretations. Because such a process can succeed only by using large oral data bases and considerably improving semantic/pragmatic descriptions, it is finally argued that the study of prosody is to linguistics and pragmatic linguistics what the microscope was for biology.
About the Authors
Mélanie Petit studied and taught Linguistics in the University of Orléans (France) where she completed her PHD under the direction of François Nemo in 2009. It dealt with the links between prosody and words’ interpretation, with a special focus on the analysis of enfin and on methodological issues. She then passed one year (2010-2011) in a postdoctoral position at the Laval University in Quebec to go further into this theme. She has recently worked (2013-2015) as Research engineer for the DIASEMIE research program (Automated prosodic discrimination), notably in the study of the prosodic realizations of French oui (‘yes’) and will be Maître de Conférences (Assistant Professor) at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne.
François Nemo studied semantics and pragmatics at the EHESS (Paris) completing in 1992, under the direction of Oswald Ducrot a PhD dedicated to the study of utterance semantics and relevance constraints. After working for the ARTFL project at the University of Chicago, he joined the University of Orléans in 1993, becoming full Professor in 2002. He is directing the Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique, founded in 1997. He has published 62 papers dealing with the semantic/pragmatic, semantic/morphology and semantic/prosody interfaces, or endangered languages lexicography and the Palikur language. He has recently directed the DIASEMIE research program (Automated prosodic discrimination).
Camille Létang studied Linguistics at the Universities of Grenoble (France) and Orléans (France), where she is currently teaching and completing, under the direction of François Nemo, a PhD thesis dedicated to the study of counter-discourse and counter argumentation, to the study of metacommunication in dialogical contexts and to the formulation of a pragmatic theory of contributions in dialogical contexts and of a contributional theory of dialog dynamics.
She has contributed since 2014 to the DIASEMIE and SEMORAL research programs (Automated prosodic discrimination) in her area of pragmatic expertise.
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