‘Attention, I’m violating a maxim!’ A unifying account of the final rise

Declarative sentences that end with a rising pitch in English (among other languages) have many uses. I single out several prominent uses that the literature so far has treated mostly independently. I present a compositional, unifying analysis, where the final rising pitch marks the violation of a conversational maxim, and its steepness indicates the speaker’s emotional activation. Existing theories are reproduced from these basic assumptions. I believe it contributes to a solid theoretical foundation for future work on the semantics and pragmatics of intonation.