Form-Meaning Interface in Constraint-based Unified Grammar: Prosody and Pragmatics

Form-Meaning Interface in Constraint-based Unified Grammar: Prosody and Pragmatics Suk-Jin Chang Seoul National University Seoul, Korea sjchang@snu.ac.kr Abstract The present work aims at a formal description of the interface between prosody and pragmatics in the framework of Constraint-based Unified Grammar CUG. It focuses on two main aspects of this interface: (1) intonation patterns vs. speech acts and (2) stress vs. topic- focus articulation. First, four terminal contours are proposed: fall, mid, rise, and high rise. They are then mapped into the speech-act types of asserting, asking, requesting, etc., centering on the grammatical constructions of nonstandard questions. Second, four levels of stress are also proposed: 0, 1, 2, 3. They are linked to the four types of topic-focus articulation: zero topic, topic, narrow focus and contrastive topic/focus. With these prosodic markings, various discourse-oriented data are analyzed to illustrate and support the principle of compositionality for building up of lexical to phrasal constructions as well as various principles and conventions in CUG such as principle of ordering, stress lineup, and TFA composition. 1. Introduction Two aspects of prosody-pragmatics interface in Korean, intonation vs. speech act and stress vs. topic-focus articulation (TFA) are presented in descriptive terms: first, four types of terminal contours (fall, mid, rise, and high rise) are set up and mapped to the speech-act types of asserting, asking, requesting, etc. on the basis of the prosodic features of echo utterances and tag questions. Second, four types of stress (0, 1, 2, 3) are also set up and mapped to four types of TFA: zero topic, topic, (narrow) focus and contrastive topic/focus. The interface between prosody and pragmatics is then presented in formal terms in the framework of Constraint- based Unified Grammar, analyzing discourse-oriented examples of nonstandard questions and a dialogue exchange to explicate building up of lexical to phrasal constructions along with grammar-internal principles and conventions such as principle of ordering, stress lineup, and TFA composition. 2. Prosody and pragmatics Before describing terminal contours and question-answer types, a brief exposition on Korean Proceedings of PACLIC 19, the 19th Asia-Pacific Conference on Language, Information and Computation sentence types and levels is in order. 2.1. Sentence types and sentence levels The following table shows the morphological conflation of the two dimensions, sentence type and sentence level in Korean (Chang 2001). (1) ST \ SL Deferential Plain Familiar Blunt Intimate Polite p a ey o e yo Declarative -(su)pnita -ta -ney -o -e -yo Interrogative -(su)pnikka -nya -na -o -e -yo Imperative -psio -(e)la -key -o -e -yo Propositive -(u)psita -ca -sey -o -e -yo Three sentence levels (SLs)—blunt, intimate and polite-- are morphologically nondistinctive as to their sentence types (STs); the distinction is partially made by the terminal contour of falling (↘) or rising (↗), as shown in (2). (2) Mia-ka wa.ss.e SM come.PST.IMT % PST = PAST IMT=INTIMATE a. Mia-ka wa.ss.e ↘ ‘Mia came. / Mia is here.’ (declarative) b. Mia-ka wa.ss.e? ↗ ‘Did Mia come? / Is Mia here?’ (interrogative) 2.2. Nonstandard questions and terminal contour Depending on the terminal …

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