Abstract
This paper provides a semantic analysis of English rise-fall-rise (RFR) intonation as a focus quantifier over assertable alternative propositions. I locate RFR meaning in the conventional implicature dimension, and propose that its effect is calculated late within a dynamic model. With a minimum of machinery, this account captures disambiguation and scalar effects, as well as interactions with other focus operators like ‘only’ and clefts. Double focus data further support the analysis, and lead to a rejection of Ward and Hirschberg’s (Language 61:747–776, 1985) claim that RFR never disambiguates. Finally, I draw out connections between RFR and contrastive topic (CT) intonation (Büring, Linguist Philos 26:511–545, 2003), and show that RFR cannot simply be reduced to a sub-case of CT.
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This research was carried out at UC Santa Cruz, and I am grateful to the everyone there for their support. The paper has benefited greatly from comments by Judith Aissen, Daniel Büring, Sandy Chung, Donka Farkas, Nancy Hedberg, Irene Heim, Shin Ishihara, Angelika Kratzer, Bill Ladusaw, Paula Menéndez-Benito, Chris Potts, Kyle Rawlins, Jesse Saba-Kirchner, Lisa Selkirk, Juan Sosa, Anne Sturgeon and Michael Wagner. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers, participants of the UCSC research seminar (winter 2006), and audiences at LASC (Linguistics at Santa Cruz) 2006, and the Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle (April 2006).
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Constant, N. English rise-fall-rise: a study in the semantics and pragmatics of intonation. Linguist and Philos 35, 407–442 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-012-9121-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-012-9121-1