Biased Questions, Intonation and Discourse

Semanticists have demonstrated repeatedly over the past twenty years that intonation often conveys information important for determining the content of a discourse. For example, intonation is important for marking focus in English, which in turn is important for interpreting sentences with focus sensitive adverbs like even and only (Beaver and Clark 2003). Intonation is also important in marking the discourse function of utterances in discourse and dialogue. For example, it is an essential clue in determining whether or not an assertion counts as a felicitous answer to a question given in the prior discourse context. The canonical way of presenting an answer to a question such as (1a) is to place the nuclear pitch accent on the constituent that replaces the wh-particle, as in (1b) (Kadmon 2001). Alternative realizations of the same sentence are anomalous, as shown in (1c).