Roles and representations of systematic phonetic fine-detail in understanding speech

Many properties of the speech signal perform multiple roles, providing strictly linguistic information as well as traditionally non-linguistic or paralinguistic information about, for example, the speaker’s identity, attitudes, and current state of mind, and contributing importantly to the broad connotative as well as the narrow denotative meaning of the utterance. An extension of this well-accepted premise is that the detailed phonetic signal is not a relatively arbitrary carrier of meaning that must be interpreted into some other form before it can be understood, but directly mappable onto meaning itself. There are many ways to say that you do not know something; the form a speaker chooses depends on what ‘extra’ information he or she wishes to convey. Spoken with a neutral intonation and ‘ordinary’ voice quality, tempo, and rhythm, the sentence I don’t know typically conveys little more than that the speaker lacks knowledge. This neutrality is itself informative: the message is not loaded with significant broader meaning. Most other ways of expressing lack of knowledge offer extra information, which the interlocutor must understand if the conversation is to be successful. The connotations are communicated phonetically by the particular segmental realisation (choice of ‘word forms’) and a wide range of other properties. The expanded form, I do not know, is often accompanied by some unusual voice quality, tempo and rhythm, and typically implies emphasis with some negative attitude such as impatience. The person who says Dunno tells us that he or she is, or has been, content not to know, or is indifferent to the listener’s wish for information; dunno can only be used in informal situations, or to convey insolence. The narrow meaning of these and other related forms is the same: the speaker lacks knowledge. But good communication demands that the wider meaning is recognized as well; detailed phonetic fine structure, together with the whole range of the mutually-understood situational context, are crucial in providing this information; and one part requires the presence of the other parts that it normally occurs with for it to have the intended meaning.