How to obtain and process perceptual judgements of intonational meaning

This chapter focuses on research into intonational meaning in Germanic languages. An overview of the current understanding of intonational meaning in these languages is thus in order (see Chen, 2005 for a detailed literature review). Generally, there are two aspects of intonation that convey meaning, the pitch contour and its phonetic implementation. Analyses of intonational meaning signalled by the pitch contour can vary in their emphasis as to which is semantically more relevant, the whole contour or its parts (Ladd, 1978). In tunes-based analyses, the meaning of the pitch contour is believed to be mainly conveyed by the whole contour. For example, four whole-utterance contours arise from the Liberman-Sag model (Liberman and Sag, 1974; Sag and Liberman, 1975), i.e. the ‘contradiction-contour’, the ‘tilde-contour’, which makes a wh-question an unambiguously real question (as opposed to a rhetorical one), the ‘hat-contour’, whereby a wh-question can be interpreted both as a real question and as a negative-implicating rhetorical question or suggestion, and the ‘surprise/redundancy contour’. In tones-based analyses, the meaning of a pitch contour is assumed to stem mostly from the meanings of its parts. For example, Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990) propose that the meaning of the contour is compositionally derivable from its components, i.e. pitch accents (H*, L*, H*+L, H+L*, L*+H, L+H*), phrase accents (H-, L-), and boundary tones (H%, L%). As regards phonetic implementation, a pitch contour can be realised with different peak and valley alignments and pitch ranges. Alignment refers to the relative timing of the pitch peak or valley in segments. Pitch range