Is Intonational Meaning Compositional ?

This paper addresses the issue of the contribution of intonation to the meaning of an utterance, and more precisely of the conditions that should be met to propose a compositional approach to the meaning of intonational contours. After presenting different positions in the literature and specifying if and how much these proposals can be said compositional, we show that their differences can be summarized in two points: (i) what is the place of phonology? (ii) what kinds of meaning are brought into play by intonation? It appears that a compositional approach to intonational meaning is possible only if one gives up the idea of a direct association between form and function and develops a proposal combining intermediate levels of representation with abstract primitives both on the phonological and on the semantic side. Then it becomes possible to analyze the contours and their meaning by defining parts having both form and meaning. The last part of the paper proposes several ideas toward a compositional analysis of the meaning of French tunes based on two hypotheses: (i) it is possible to distinguish between the contributions of pitch accents and those of boundary tones; (ii) intonational meaning is interactional. We claim that French tunes indicate the consensual or contentious aspect of the related content, the degree of speaker commitment and the way the speaker takes on the validation of the content of the utterance or delegates it to the addressee.