The meaning of French “implication” contour in conversation
Résumé
tune which presents very interesting semantic properties. It has been called “intonation d'implication” by Delattre [1] suggesting that the contour triggers an implicit meaning, i.e. an implicature in Gricean terms. Besides, the “implication” contour has been claimed to convey various attitudinal meanings from obviousness to exasperation, and also to mark contrastive focus. The aim of the present paper is to give a unified account of these seemingly differing semantic descriptions of the “implication” contour in French, using a dynamic semantic framework, namely Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). We claim that the main semantic component of the “implication” contour is to convey a contradiction (or a contrast). We first sketch our DRTtheoretical approach, and then apply it to occurrences of the “implication” contour in a corpus of conversational dialogue.
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