WHERE PROSODY MEETS PRAGMATICS: REsEARCH AT THE INTERFACE

Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning, and it is well known that prosody or, more informally, ' tone of voice' can contribute crucially to that meaning. Pragmatic effects in speech are thus the product of both what is said and how it is said, and the two are inextricably linked. However, while many working in pragmatics are well aware of the important contribution of prosody, exactly how these effects are generated is harder to establish. A number of the ways in which prosody plays a pragmatic role are set out in t?is volume. It aims to give a cross-section of the many different topics and approaches within the field of prosody and its interface with pragmatics. Levinson (1983), in his textbook on pragmatics, acknowledged that the absence of prosody from his account, particularly intonation, was a serious omission, but justified the omission on two grounds: first that there was as yet no agreement on how to analyse intonation, and second that the area was understudied. Twenty-five years on, the American autosegmental model, captured in the ToBI transcription system, has become the international standard in intonational phonology (e.g. Ladd, 1996; Gussenhoven, 2004), and for typological comparison (Jun, 2005), but other models still continue to have currency, including variations of the British system ofholistic contours (fall, rise, fall-rise etc.). None, however, accounts sufficiently for all pragmatic effects of prosody which also derive from the kind of effects often referred to as paralinguistic. Levinson's second caveat, that the area was understudied, is easier to counter. Interest in the contribution of prosody to pragmatic meaning has grown markedly in the intervening decades, albeit in a fragmented way, and from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. The scope of these developments depends on one's view of pragmatics. The Anglo-American approach