Workshop / Atelier
14 mai 2007
Universit de Paris 7 Š 30 rue du chateau des rentiers, 75013 Paris
salle 131 le matin, salle 134 l'aprs-midi
9h30-10h15 Maria
Safarova (Tilburg University)
Rising
and falling y/n interrogatives in English
10h15-10h35 discussion
pause
10h45-11h30 Elisabet Engdahl (Gteborg University)
Declarative Questions in Swedish and Norwegian
11h30-11h50 discussion
djeuner
14h-14h45 Claire Beyssade (IJN, Paris), Elisabeth Delais et Jean-Marie Marandin (LLF,
Paris 7)
Intonation
of questions in French
14h45-15H05 discussion
pause
15h15-15h45 Jean-Marie Marandin (LLF, Paris 7) et Hiyon Yoo (ARP, Paris 7)
Mouvements finaux dans les interrogatives. Construction
d'un paradigme.
15h45-16H05 discussion
pause
16h15-17h Nicholas Asher (IRIT, Toulouse)
Towards rethinking the prosodic/semantic interface
17h00-17h20 discussion
Organis par Claire Beyssade avec le soutien
du GDR 2521 Smantique et Modlisation et
du projet ANR Pro-gram.
Abstracts / Rsums des interventions
Nicholas Asher :
Intonation and Tag Questions : towards rethinking the prosodic/semantic
interface
In this talk I will review some work
carried out by Brian Reese and myself on tag questions. I will show how
intonation changes the conveyed content of this construction. I will then make
some general remarks about how to integrate intonational information into the
computation of meaning.
Claire Beyssade, Elisabeth Delais & Jean-Marie Marandin : Intonation of questions in French
Partant de l'hypothse
selon laquelle le profil mlodique d'un nonc peut tre analys en trois
zones, que nous appelons pr-nuclaire, nuclaire et post-nuclaire, nous
essaierons de dcrire les profils mlodiques associs aux questions en
franais. Nous montrerons, en nous appuyant sur des exemples issus de
diffrents corpus oraux, qu'il n'existe pas en franais un contour nuclaire
unique permettant de caractriser les questions, ni mme un contour unique pour
chaque type de question (question wh antpos, question wh in situ, question
dclarative etc). Nous montrerons en revanche qu'on peut chercher dans
l'ancrage du contour nuclaire la marque de la diffrence de type syntaxique,
ou, en d'autres termes, que les modalits d'ancrage du contour nuclaire
permettent de faire le dpart entre phrases dclaratives et phrases
interrogatives.
Elisabet
Engdahl : Declarative Questions in Swedish
and Norwegian
Whereas
all natural languages have means of systematically distinguishing questions
from statements, speakers often donÕt rely on these in ordinary
conversations. Instead they use
statements (utterances with declarative form) which are interpreted as
questions by the interlocutor, who responds as if it had been an interrogative.
How then do dialogue participants know whether a declarative utterance is
intended to be a statement or a question?
I have
analyzed occurrences of declarative questions in spontaneous Swedish and Norwegian dialogues, using
GinzburgÕs (1996, to appear) notion question under discussion. The analyzed turns have declarative
clause word order, do not contain any question particles and are not
prosodically marked as questions, i.e. by rising intonation. Still itÕs clear from the addresseeÕs
next turn that s/he interprets the declarative as a question. The addressee
typically replies by ŌyesÕ or ŌnoÕ and sometimes elaborates this short answer.
It turns out that the majority of the clear cases of declarative questions
involve what Labov & Fanshel (1977) call B-events, i.e. facts that the
addressee is likely to have more information about than the speaker. A
statement about an A-event, i.e. facts involving the speaker, is not normally
interpreted as a question, as can be seen from the addresseeÕs uptake.
Declarative
questions rarely seem to cause problems for the interlocutor. If the
identification of the speech act depended on syntactic, morphological or
prosodic cues, one might have expected declarative questions to be harder to
decode, but this is not the case. The fact that declarative questions are
handled so smoothly suggests that dialogue participants rapidly evaluate the
content of the utterance with respect to the information states of the participants.
Ginzburg,
Jonathan. 1996. The
Semantics of Interrogatives. In S. Lappin, ed., The Handbook of Contemporary
Semantic Theory, 385Š422. Oxford:
Blackwell. Ginzburg,
Jonathan. to appear. A Semantics for Interaction in Dialogue. CSLI
and University of Chicago Press. Labov, W. & D. Fanshel (1977) Therapeutic
Discourse. Psychotherapy as Conversation. New York:
Academic Press.
Jean-Marie
Marandin & Hiyon Yoo : Mouvements finaux dans les interrogatives. Construction
d'un paradigme.
Nous nous intressons aux
mouvements mlodiques affectant la dernire syllabe du domaine nuclaire et
celle du domaine post-nuclaire dans les interrogatives. A partir de
lÕobservation de 60 interrogatives (interrogatives-qu contour descendant
produites par une mme locutrice), nous construisons (par synthse) le
paradigme complet de ces mouvements. Nous testons en reconnaissance leur
naturalit et leur signification. On prsentera les rsultats dÕune premire
tude pilote, ainsi que lÕhypothse selon laquelle ces mouvements peuvent tre
analyss comme la ralisation du ton de frontire que nous avons postul dans
la dfinition du contour nuclaire.
Maria
Safarova : Rising
and falling y/n-interrogatives in English
In American English, about a half of
y/n-interrogatives (i.e., questions with subject-verb inversion, as well as
reversed and same polarity tag questions) are rising and about a half of them
are falling. Why is that? It is generally assumed that falling - but not rising
- y/n-interrogatives express speaker's bias. In my talk I will address the
notion of bias, present results of some empirical studies and attempt to relate
the findings to Hirschberg's claims about scalar implicature.