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Implicating uncertainty: The pragmatics of fall–rise intonation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Gregory Ward and
Julia Hirschberg
Gregory Ward
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
Julia Hirschberg
Affiliation:
Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ
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Abstract

An analysis of naturally occurring data reveals that the FALL–RISE intonational contour makes a context-independent contribution to utterance interpretation: the conveyance of speaker UNCERTAINTY. Two necessary conditions are proposed for the felicitous use of fall–rise: (a) some item referenced in an utterance must be perceived as linked by a scalar relationship with its context; and (b) speaker uncertainty with respect to the scale or scalar value evoked must be plausible. The conveyance of uncertainty constitutes a pragmatic contribution to utterance interpretation, which we analyse in Gricean terms as a case of conventional implicature. Other effects, such as irony or politeness, may be conveyed via this implicature.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 61 , Issue 4 , December 1985, pp. 747 - 776
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Dave Graff for his assistance in the preparation of the spectrograms used in our analysis and Franz Seitz for his help in recording the contours. We also thank Dwight Bolinger, Debbie Dahl, Tony Kroch, Robert Ladd, Janet Pierrehumbert, Susan Pintzuk, and Ellen Prince for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to Debbie Dahl, Anny Ewing, Kathy McCoy, Martha Pollack, and Ethel Schuster for providing some of our naturally occurring data. This paper represents a much revised account of research carried out at the University of Pennsylvania, and introduced in Hirschberg & Ward 1984.

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