On the intonation of mono- and di-syllabic words within the discourse framework of conversational games
Jacqueline C. Kowtko · 1992
Recent studies on the analysis of intonational function examine a ran~ of materials from cue phrases in monologue (Litman and Hirschberg, 1990) and dialogue (Hirschberg and Litman, 1987;Hockey, 1991) to longer utterances in both monologue and dialogue (McLemore, 1991).Results match specific intonational tunes to certain discourse functions which are more or less well defined.Although these results make a convincing case that intonation does signal a change in discourse structure, the specification of discourse function remains vague.A suitable taxonomy is needed to fine-tune the relationship between intonation and discourse function.A recent analysis of dialogue (Kowtko et al., 1991) provides a framework of conversational games which allows more fine-grained examination of prosodic function.The current paper introduces an intonational analysis of monoand di-syllabic words based upon such a framework and compares results in progress with previous work on intonation.