`Attention, I'm violating a maxim!' A unifying account of the final rise. Westera, M. In Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (SemDial), 2013.
`Attention, I'm violating a maxim!' A unifying account of the final rise [pdf]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
Declarative sentences that end with a rising pitch in English (among other languages) have many uses. I single out several prominent uses that the literature so far has treated mostly independently. I present a compositional, unifying analysis, where the final rising pitch marks the violation of a conversational maxim, and its steepness indicates the speaker's emotional activation. Existing theories are reproduced from these basic assumptions. I believe it contributes to a solid theoretical foundation for future work on the semantics and pragmatics of intonation.

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