The Consistent Meaning of Intonational Tunes Across Sentence Type in American English

Compositional accounts of intonational nuclear tune meaning propose that tunes have an impact on speech act meaning that is independent from the sentence type [1, 2, 3, 4]. We provide experimental support for this account through two intonation perception experiments on American English comparing the speech act inferences listeners draw based on rising (L*H-H%) and falling (H*L-L%) imperatives with those drawn based on rising and falling declaratives [5]. Native speakers of American English heard steep rising, shallow rising, and falling intonation on imperative sentences and performed a 2AFC task asking them to categorize each utterance as a Suggestion or a Command. Our results indicate that rising and falling tunes result in the same types of speech act meaning inferences when paired with imperatives (Commands vs. Suggestions) as they do with declaratives (Assertions vs. Questions) [5]. Additionally, we show that within-category variation for a single tune in terms of the pitch span (e.g. shallow rising vs. steep rising tunes) affects the likelihood of a given speech act response in the same manner for imperatives as for declaratives, although this pattern is limited to the non-default tune + type pairing.