Exhaustivity and intonation: a unified theory. Westera, M. Ph.D. Thesis, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, 2017. A video of a talk which explains some of the main content of the thesis is available online: https://amupod.univ-amu.fr/video/2503-seminaire-de-matthijs-westera-intonational-compliance-marking-a-theory-of-english-intonational-meaning/![Exhaustivity and intonation: a unified theory [pdf]](https://bibbase.org/img/filetypes/pdf.svg "pdf")
Paper abstract bibtex This dissertation presents a precise, unified and explanatory theory of human conversation, centered on two broad phenomena: exhaustivity implications and intonational meaning. In a nutshell: (i) speakers have two types of communicative intentions, namely information sharing and attention sharing, (ii) these types of intentions ideally comply with a certain set of rationality criteria, or maxims, (iii) speakers of English and related languages use intonation, in particular socalled trailing tones and boundary tones, to indicate whether such compliance is achieved, and (iv) exhaustivity implications arise when this holds, at least, for the attention-sharing intention. The research presented here goes against a number of widespread assumptions in the field. The result is a perspective on conversation that enables new solutions to a broad range of well-known puzzles surrounding exhaustivity and intonation. Among these are the ``symmetry problem'', the ``epistemic step'' without a competence assumption, the role of informationally redundant disjuncts, the bias expressed by rising declaratives, the range of uses of rise-fall-rise intonation, the effects of different intonation contours in lists, and differences between questions with rising and falling intonation.
@phdthesis{Westera:17,
abstract = {This dissertation presents a precise, unified and explanatory theory of human conversation, centered on two broad phenomena: exhaustivity implications and intonational meaning. In a nutshell: (i) speakers have two types of communicative intentions, namely information sharing and attention sharing, (ii) these types of intentions ideally comply with a certain set of rationality criteria, or maxims, (iii) speakers of English and related languages use intonation, in particular socalled trailing tones and boundary tones, to indicate whether such compliance is achieved, and (iv) exhaustivity implications arise when this holds, at least, for the attention-sharing intention.
The research presented here goes against a number of widespread assumptions in the field. The result is a perspective on conversation that enables new solutions to a broad range of well-known puzzles surrounding exhaustivity and intonation. Among these are the ``symmetry problem'', the ``epistemic step'' without a competence assumption, the role of informationally redundant disjuncts, the bias expressed by rising declaratives, the range of uses of rise-fall-rise intonation, the effects of different intonation contours in lists, and differences between questions with rising and falling intonation.},
author = {Matthijs Westera},
date-added = {2021-08-17 00:00:00 +0000},
date-modified = {2021-08-17 00:00:00 +0000},
note = {A video of a talk which explains some of the main content of the thesis is available online: https://amupod.univ-amu.fr/video/2503-seminaire-de-matthijs-westera-intonational-compliance-marking-a-theory-of-english-intonational-meaning/},
school = {Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam},
title = {Exhaustivity and intonation: a unified theory},
url = {http://mwestera.humanities.uva.nl/downloads/Westera%202017%20-%20PhD%20thesis%20-%20Exhaustivity%20and%20intonation.pdf},
year = {2017},
Bdsk-Url-1 = {http://mwestera.humanities.uva.nl/downloads/Westera%202017%20-%20PhD%20thesis%20-%20Exhaustivity%20and%20intonation.pdf}}
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