Abstract
In Chap. 2, intonation was defined as tonal morphemes. This definition is justified only if there is sufficient supporting evidence. The purpose of this chapter and Chaps. 4–6 is to present this evidence. It is widely accepted and not very controversial to claim that tones which function to mark grammatical features (e.g., definiteness, grammatical case, etc.) are morphemes, so nothing will be said about those types of tonal morphemes in this chapter, but Chap. 4 will cite several examples of grammatical tones. The discussion in this chapter is limited to discourse intonation. Linguists generally agree that discourse intonation is meaningful, but as is the case with all aspects of intonation, linguists’ views on this issue vary widely. In the following section, I will review some of the key views expressed about intonational meaning in the literature, and where appropriate, will relate those views to what is proposed about intonational meaning in this book. In Sect. 3.2, these views on intonational meaning are then contrasted with linguists’ views on the meanings of discourse particles. Views about the relationship between discourse particles and intonation will also be discussed. Based on all of this, I will ultimately argue that discourse particles and discourse intonation are two forms of the same thing. Chapter 4 will then present examples from the literature that provide evidence of this relationship between segmental and tonal particles, both grammatical and discoursal.
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- 1.
- 2.
Intuitively, I have the impression that the “obvious” tone starts from a higher point, but a detailed contrastive phonological analysis of these three tones (i.e., contrastive, emphatic, and obvious) would need to be conducted in order to make any strong claims.
- 3.
This rising discourse tone has received much negative press, and the term “uptalk” itself can have negative connotations. Warren (2016) considered using other terms but settled on this one because it is well known and because other names given to this tone also have problems. Webb (2008, cited in Warren 2016: 5), for example, called it a high-rising tone (HRT), and used the labels “declarative HRT” and “question HRT” to distinguish the declarative uptalk tone from question tones. Warren said HRT is problematic because “hormone replacement therapy” is the most common thing to show up on internet searches. I have a problem with Webb’s labels for a different reason, which is that I consider rising-tone questions to be declaratives (cf. Bartels 1999; Gunlogson 2003; see also Sect. 7.2.2).
- 4.
Contrary to this view, Chap. 7 offers a proposal for the syntactic properties of intonation based on the hypothesis that there are no syntactic differences between segmental particles and intonation (i.e., tonal morphemes).
- 5.
Of course, this does not disallow the possibility of two or more contours overlapping or occurring consecutively.
- 6.
Cantonese can also be said to have nine or ten tones, depending on how they are analyzed (Bauer and Wakefield 2019: 22).
- 7.
- 8.
Saying that an SFP is “suffixed” to or “attached” to a sentence is metaphorical. They are bound morphemes in the sense that they cannot be used in isolation, but they are not bound morphemes in the sense that they attach to a root morpheme to form a word. Syntactically, an SFP is assumed to be a morpheme that heads its own functional phrase (see Chap. 7).
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Wakefield, J.C. (2020). Intonational Meaning. In: Intonational Morphology. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2265-9_3
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