The pragmatic interpretation of English intonation: Sorority speech

Previous research on intonational meaning has resulted in proposals too specific to be useful in analyzing intonational form and function across contexts and groups of speakers. This work is an analysis of recurrent intonational patterns in a relatively well-defined socio-cultural group. The goal of this research is to identify the interpretation of particular intonational forms with respect to text, context, and culture, in order to isolate the meaning that can be attributed solely to the intonation, and to suggest the ways in which it interacts with other factors to convey meaning.; The socio-cultural group under study is a university sorority, a socially homogeneous group of women who share an explicitly articulated cultural ideology. Intonational patterns in twenty-five hours of tape recorded speech data collected within the sorority are examined for their co-occurrence with other sub-systems of rhetorical structure (pause phrasing and surface syntax), their distributional patterns within and across situations, and their relation to the shared communicative goals and strategies of speakers. The analysis of intonational interpretation is made on the basis of this distributional evidence, as well as interactants' responses in context and their subsequent judgments.; The findings of this research suggest that the representation of intonational meaning is rather more abstract than previous work has found, with much of the interpretive burden placed on the particulars of context. That is, rather than representing specific emotional, interactive or text-related meanings, intonational forms have no inherent 'meaning'; rather, they are diagrammatic icons interpreted in context according to the shared communicative conventions of speakers, including communicative norms for particular situations and conventions for marking textual and contextual relations.