Prosody and Semi-Compositionality in SDRT

Jacques Jayez (1) , Mathilde Dargnat (2)

1 L2C2 - Laboratoire sur le langage, le cerveau et la cognition
2 ATILF - Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française

We examine the status of French major continuative prosodic contours, which are mainly realised as final rises at the boundary of sentences. We show how to substantiate the common intuition that these contours convey ‘continuation'. We report empirical evidence that indicates that native speakers cannot distinguish major continuatives and questions in isolated discourse segments. We then show how to integrate continuatives into a liberal version of Asher's SDRT. In essence, we propose that any discourse constituent bearing a major continuative (i) has a default question interpretation when taken in isolation and (ii) constrains attachments at the point where it occurs, when considered in the context of a discourse.

Domaines: Linguistique

Jacques Jayez, Mathilde Dargnat. Prosody and Semi-Compositionality in SDRT. Workshop Constraints in Discourse 3, Benjamins, pp.1-20, 2011. ⟨hal-00546000⟩