Discourse ’major continuatives’ in a non-monotonic framework

Delattre (1966) proposed a classification of French basic melodic contours. He defined in particular ‘major continuatives’ as melodic rises that mark the frontier between higher constituents in a hierarchy of clausal and sentential constituents. Although Delattre’s empirical basis for his classification has been discussed, there is a strong intuition that some sort of melodic rise can be used in French at the frontier between discourse constituents. The go al of this paper is to explore this possibility in two directions. First, we provide experimental evidence that, taken in isolation, major continuatives are not significantly discriminated from interrogative contours by ‘naïve’ subjects, having no training in phonetics. Second, we try to account for the fact that, in real discourse, people do not confuse major continuatives and interrogative contours, by controlling the interactions between interpretation constraints using a non-monotonic logic in the general framework of Answer Set Programming.