Epistemic Meaning and the LLL Tune in American English

Abstract

In American English, the pitch pattern at the end of a prosodic phrase—the nuclear tune—conveys pragmatic meaning, which can be characterized in epistemic terms as relating to the mutual beliefs of the speaker and their addressee [1]. Epistemic accounts have been offered for the meaning of rising and falling nuclear tunes [2], or a mid-level pitch plateau [3], but the epistemic contribution for many other tunes has not been addressed. This paper addresses one such gap in the literature, examin-ing the meaning of the L*L-L% contour in American English through two experiments testing listeners’ preferences for H*L-L% vs. L*L-L% with declarative sentences as a function of whether the associated proposition is ruled in (congruent with speaker and addressee shared knowledge) or ruled out (incon-gruent). Our results show that listeners find L*L-L% to be more felicitous than H*L-L% in ruled-out contexts, despite prior claims that H*L-L% is the default tune for declarative assertions. A follow-up experiment shows that the preference for L*L-L% in ruled-out contexts remains even when the intonation is made redundant by explicit acknowledgement of the ruled-out status of the proposition. We conclude that L*L-L% makes an independent epistemic contribution to utterance meaning in American English and propose that a speaker uses L*L-L% to signal that they withhold their commitment to the propositional content of their utterance.