| Intonation conveys information about the speaker's interests and beliefs. However, there is little agreement as to the exact nature of this relationship. The questions remain: what do speakers know that enables them to choose where to place pitch accents in an utterance and what do hearers know that enables them to correctly interpret these pitch accents. This study argues that there are three pragmatic factors that determine the occurrence and significant non-occurrence of pitch accents: givenness, informativeness, and topic/comment structure. These factors are explicitly defined in a computational model of pragmatics and intonation, which has been implemented in a concept-to-speech system.;Researchers have suggested that accent placement is determined by givenness. The basic idea is that speakers deaccent expressions that refer to entities that are currently being talked about and accent expressions that refer to entities that are new to the discourse. The exceptions to this are usually explained by positing special accent placement rules that are operative only for a particular class of counter-examples. This study demonstrates that accent placement in all these cases arise from the interaction of the strategy of givenness with strategies based on informativeness and topic/comment structure. Simply put, speakers, in pursuing the strategy of informativeness, tend to accent constituents that express informative/interesting information and deaccent constituents that express uninformative/uninteresting information. So, for example, in the exchange We're here to deliver the SEven foot concert Steinway--We ordered the NINE-foot concert Steinway, nine is accented because it is informative in that it distinguishes the piano ordered from the one received, and foot concert Steinway is uninformative and thus deaccented. Speakers, in pursuing a strategy based on topic/comment structure place an accent within that part of the utterance that represents the comment. In order for an utterance to be relevant to the addressee, it must link up to information that she or he already possesses and contain information that is new to her or him. This link + new information is the topic/comment structure of the utterance. |
