Exclamation Intonation Beth Sturman and Jessica Rett UCLA

Exclamation Intonation Beth Sturman and Jessica Rett (UCLA) CUSP 11 10/27/18

Puzzle • Intonation seems to be a critical component of the realization of exclamation. Consider the following minimal pair: John arrived on time • Given this contrast, we should explore the intonation of exclamation in hopes of moving towards a more fully compositional semantic analysis • Similar work by Gunlogson 2004, Condoravdi & Lauer 2012, Ahn et al. 2016, among others, for other utterance types 2

What’s exclamation! • They’re generally thought to be encoding surprise or unexpectedness • (1) and (2) form a minimal pair with respect to exclamation: 1. Jane solved the problem. assertion 2. a. (Wow, ) Jane solved the problem! sentence exclamation b. (Wow, ) How quickly J solved the problem! wh-exclamative c. (Wow, ) Did Jane solve the problem! inversion exclamative d. (Wow, ) The problem Jane solved! nominal exclamative • Exclamatives have construction-specific morpho-syntactic attributes (Michaelis & Lambrecht 1996) • Exclamatives involve an extreme degree interpretation (Rett 2011) 3

Overview • We looked at the intonation contours of exclamations with the goal of investigating the relationship between the prosodic and semantic features of exclamation • We find three key intonational differences between assertions and exclamations, all of which conspire to indicate that the proposition violates speaker expectations: 1. L+H* • Assertion (H*) with added salience (L+H rise) (Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg, 1990) 2. Extra-high targets • Pitch targets well exceed default pitch range 3. Insertion of extra intermediate phrase boundaries • Extra prominence by elevating more pitch accents to nuclear status 4

Background: Intonation in English • We use the MAE_To. BI (Mainstream American English Tone and Break Indices, Beckman et al. , 2004) system to discuss English intonation • English is a pitch-accented language • Pitch accents mark post-lexical emphasis via intensity, segment articulation, and F 0 pitch targets (Ayers, 1996; Ladd, 2008) • Pitch accents are autosegmental and associate with stressed syllables (*) • Native speakers perceive pitch accented words as more prominent • English has two primitive post-lexical tones (H and L) that combine to form 5 pitch accent types. Of interest today: • H* • L+H* 5

Background: Intonation in English IP ip ip H* H* HH* L- L% [This is a sentence] [with two ips] • English has two levels of prosodic phrasing above the word (intermediate phrase (ip), Intonational Phrase (IP)) • Each Intonational Phrase contains at least one intermediate phrase, and each intermediate phrase contains at least one pitch accent • Each IP and ip contributes a final boundary tone (H-, L-, H%, L%) • The final pitch accent in an intermediate phrase is known as the Nuclear Pitch Accent (NPA) and is perceived as more prominent 6

Methodology • We hired a linguistically naïve consultant to read a series of exclamations: • • Varied in length (short, medium, long) Varied the presence or absence of discourse particle “Wow, …” Included all four syntactic constructions 23 sentences total (1 short inversion excluded due to speech error) • Embedded in contexts that licensed exclamation • Counterbalanced with unrelated fillers 7

Items • Short: 1. 2. 3. 4. (Wow, ) John bakes delicious desserts! (Wow, ) What delicious desserts John bakes! (Wow, ) Can John bake desserts! (Wow, ) The desserts that man bakes! • Medium: • (Wow, ) Liliana bakes delicious creme brulee! • Long: • (Wow, ) Liliana has a ridiculous amount of shoes! • (Wow, ) How ridiculously many shoes Liliana has! 8

Background: Default pitch range • A speaker’s default pitch range is the fundamental frequency range they employ in unmarked prosodic contexts (e. g. falling declaratives, polar questions, wh-questions) • Our consultant’s default pitch range was 80 -200 Hz: in line with reported male speaker pitch range (Traunmüller & Eriksson, 1995) • Established consultant’s default pitch range via filler items 9

Feature 1: L+H* • L+H* is the most salient pitch accent type (Ayers, 1996) • Highly prominent due to the steep rise ending in a high target on the stressed vowel • Out of 82 total pitch accents in the 23 target items, 59 were L+H*/L+!H* • Next most common PA was H*/!H* (n=20) 10

Feature 2: extra-high targets • Recall that Jimmy’s default pitch range is 80 -200 HZ • We define an extra-high target (EHT) as >220 Hz • Short: 2 EHT (2/7 items) • Medium: 8 EHT (6/8 items) • Long: 15 EHT (8/8 items) 11

Feature 2: extra-high targets • Extra-high targets are an important feature of exclamation • High targets that aren’t high enough lose the feeling of note-worthiness. • Follows previous work on the interpretation of L*+H L-H% contour shifting based on pitch range (Hirschberg & Ward, 1992) (1) (2) • Phonetics/phonology side notes: • Possible evidence that MAE_To. BI transcription is too coarse • We remain agnostic about whether this is an instance of pitch range expansion such as in focus in Mandarin (Jin, 1996) or accentual boost as found in Japanese (Kubuzono, 2007) 12

Feature 3: extra ip-boundary insertions • Exclamations include more ip-boundaries than we would expect from default declarative intonation. • Recall that in English, the final PA in an ip is the nuclear PA. The nuclear pitch accent is perceived as the most prominent PA in the ip. • Prosodic boundaries in both Seoul Korean (Jun, 2011) and in Yanbian Korean (Jun and Jiang, to appear) can be inserted for reasons of focus/prominence marking in addition to alignment with syntactic structure • We propose that these additional ips are being inserted in exclamation to mark more content as prominent. 13

Feature 3: extra ip-boundary insertions • The words marked with NPAs were often the words associated with L+^H* pitch accents • The most frequently NPA-marked words included: • delicious, desserts (short) • delicious, (crème) brulee (medium) • Ridiculous(ly), shoes (long) • Additional evidence for extra ip-boundary insertion included the presence of a phrase accent (L-) and larger junctures 14

Feature 3: extra ip-boundary insertions 15

Conclusions • There are four different types of exclamations, if you think about them syntactically • But, perhaps surprisingly, they’re unified in their prosodic realizations 1. 2. 3. L+H* Extra-high targets Insertion of extra ip boundaries • There’s a little bit of independent work to show, for each of these, that they conspire towards the same goal of making the utterance extremely phonetically and phonologically prominent and thereby semantically salient • We argue that this is the most natural phonetic reflex of an intonation contour whose function it is to mark unexpectedness 16

Acknowledgments • Thank you to our consultants, Jimmy Kelly and Connor Mayer, as well as Adam Royer, Sun-Ah Jun, and the members of the UCLA Contouring Club and Semantics Tea for their helpful feedback. This research was funded by a UCLA Committee on Research grant. 17

References • Ahn, B. , Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. and Veillieux, N. 2016. Evidence and intonational contours: an experimental approach to meaning in intonation. • Ayers, G. M. 1996. Nuclear accent types and prominence: some psycholinguistic experiments. • Beckman, M. and Hirschberg, J. and Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. 2005. The original TOBI system and the evolution of the TOBI framework. • Condoravdi, C. and Lauer, S. 2012. Imperatives: meaning and illocutionary force. • Gunlogson, C. 2004. True to form: rising and falling declaratives as questions in English. • Hirschberg, J. and Ward, G. 1992. The influence of pitch, range, duration, amplitude, and spectral features on the interpretation of the rise-fall-rise intonation contour in English. • Jin, S. 1996. An Acoustic Study of Sentence Stress in Mandarin Chinese. • Jun, S. -A. and Jiang, X. To appear. Differences in prosodic phrasing in marking syntax vs. focus: Data from Yanbian Korean. • Kubozono, H. 2007. Focus and intonation in Japanese: Does focus trigger pitch reset. • Ladd, D. 2008. Intonational phonology. • Michaelis, L. and Lambrecht, K. 1996. The exclamative sentence type in English. • Pierrehumbert, J. and Hirschberg, J. 1990. The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. • Rett, J. 2011. Exclamatives, degrees, and speech acts. • Traunmüller, H. , & Eriksson, A. 1995. The frequency range of the voice fundamental in the speech of male and female adults. 18