Towards a Compositional Semantics for English Intonation

Brown, Currie and Kenworthy 1980 and Brown 1983 provided an important corrective to the discussion of information structure of that time by reasserting the central role of intonation in its expression in English. Bolinger (1958, 1961) and Halliday (1963, 1967a,b) had laid the foundation of a discourse semantics for tunes, but their insights had largely neen ignored in subsequent work on information structure attempting to extend Halliday’s given-new distinction by Haviland and Clark (1974), Clark and Clark (1977), Clark and Haviland (1977), Prince (1981), and Sanford and Garrod (1981). In more recent work by Selkirk (1984), and particularly Hirschberg and Pierrehumbert (1986) and Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990), among others, there has been a renewed attempt to define a compositional semantics of information and propositional attitude for the intonational system. The present paper offers a new semantics for the tones which I believe to be closer than earlier work (including my own) to the spirit of Halliday’s and Brown’s original insight that the tones are as directly associated with elements of a compositional discourse semantics as are words with more traditional elements of semantics.