1 Some perspective on prosody and pragmatic functions

To set the stage for the papers and to explain why we stress the role of pragmatic function as a prerequisite to prosodic modeling, this section takes a brief look at some historical developments in intonation research. Figure 1 provides an example-based overview of intonational representations. Starting with the strategy that Tuscan monks used in the 15th century for remembering the Gregorian chants associated with Bible texts (in this way inventing the modern concept of musical notes, Kelly Reference Kelly2014), we see the styles used in the early works of Steele (Reference Steele1779), Caswell (Reference Caswell1870), Jones (Reference Jones1909), the meandering text of Bolinger (Reference Bolinger1989), the tonetic stress marks of the British School of intonation (Kingdon Reference Kingdon1958), GAT2 (Selting et al. Reference Selting, Auer, Barth-Weingarten, Bergmann, Bergmann, Birkner, Couper-Kuhlen, Deppermann, Gilles, Günthner, Hartung, Kern, Mertzlufft, Meyer, Morek, Oberzaucher, Peters, Quasthoff, Schütte, Stukenbrock and Uhmann2009) and the DIMA variant of the autosegmental–metrical framework (Ladd Reference Ladd2008, Kügler et al. Reference Kügler, Smolibocki, Arnold, Baumann, Braun, Grice, Jannedy, Michalsky, Niebuhr, Peters, Ritter, Röhr, Schweitzer, Schweitzer and Wagner2015). This is just a sampling of the enormous range of methods that have been invented and used to represent and examine the melody of speech; and of course today we still have an enormous range of competing representation concepts and models.

Figure 1 Representations of intonation through history.

This diversity of intonational representations contrasts sharply with the situation for the segmental aspects of speech. This is true even though all of speech is, ultimately, composed of ‘changes in the cavities of vocal tract – openings or closings, widenings or narrowings, lengthenings or shortenings’ (Liberman & Whalen Reference Liberman and Whalen2000: 188). Nevertheless, description in terms of individual sound segments is far more convenient, and has remained as a heuristic instrument of international scholarly consensus, as in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

A key question is: Where does the relative stability and consensus in the representation of speech segments come from, and what does its absence for prosody imply for research? While many factors are doubtless involved, including the power of an established orthography and the tactile feedback of apical articulations and various oral-cavity constrictions that are lacking for prosody, we think the most important source of stability is the unit of the lexical item (Bolinger Reference Bolinger1963). The existence of words enables articulatory sound patterns to ground out in solid semantics. That is, they are connected to and grounded in concepts understandable and transparent to all native speakers of a language, even though these concepts are often abstract or multifaceted (Harnad Reference Harnad1990, Lakoff Reference Lakoff1990). For example, with semantics in the background it is relatively easy to determine that Dutch ['ɛιxәlәk], ['ɛιxk] and ['ɛιk] are all variants of the same ‘thing’ (eigenlijk 'actually', Ernestus & Smith, Reference Ernestus, Smith, Cangemi, Clayards, Niebuhr, Schuppler and Zellers2018; see also Hawkins Reference Hawkins2003). With such semantic grounding, syntagmatic boundaries within sound patterns can be defined consistently and (allowing for some coarticulatory tolerance) mostly unambiguously. Moreover, the semantic grounding serves as a constant point of reference to identify, describe, and model variation.

In comparison, in prosody, we constantly struggle with the question of whether some relatively small differences should be interpreted as belonging or not belonging to the same ‘thing’, that is, whether some variation is phonetic or phonological in nature. For example, autosegmental–metrical intonation approaches of German distinguish four pitch-accent categories in the Oldenburg model, five pitch-accent categories in the Stuttgart model, and six categories in the GToBI model (Mayer Reference Mayer1995, Grice & Baumann Reference Grice and Baumann2002, Peters Reference Peters2014); see also the discussions in Kohler (Reference Kohler2005) and Rathcke & Harrington (Reference Rathcke, Harrington, Fougeron, Kühnert, D'Imperio and Vallée2010). One reason for this is that we lack points of reference as good as those we have for lexical items; and one reason for this, in turn, is that intonational meanings are typically of a pragmatic nature and as such less tangible and definable than word meanings. However, the pragmatic meanings of intonational patterns have been a subject of intense and controversial discussions (Gussenhoven Reference Gussenhoven2004, Ladd Reference Ladd2008, Arvaniti Reference Arvaniti, van Oostendorp, Ewen, Hume and Rice2011, Prieto Reference Prieto2015), and it is to be hoped that better-defined pragmatic meanings will complement and eventually replace the roles that behavioral data – like reaction times and discrimination abilities – currently play in defining within- and between-category variation for prosodic phonology.

Therefore, as in the domain of morphosyntax, intonation research needs much closer integration of analyses of forms and analyses of functions (Arvaniti Reference Arvaniti2016), so that ultimately the latter can provide solid grounding, as in lexical semantics. If we think of forms and functions as two sides of the same coin in prosody, our understanding and modeling of one side of the coin has a decisive influence on understanding and modeling the other side of the coin. To date the success of black-box models has been in domains where this complexity can be ignored.

Against this background, the present special issue makes significant progress by providing new insights into both phonological representation and pragmatic function.

2 Issues and challenges

First of all, we would like to emphasize that, in addition to their theoretical import, the papers in this special issue contribute a wide range of empirical facts to our understanding of prosody. The pragmatic functions considered include obviousness, greeting, reprimanding, self-repair, upgraded assessments and sarcasm, among others; the languages studied are Peninsular Spanish, Colombian Spanish, French, and British English. Across the differences in topic and approach, all four papers contribute to the goals of this special issue: all identify meanings for prosodic forms, all move beyond the traditional concerns of prosody research to explore dialog-related, interactional, and social meanings, and all examine prosody beyond just intonation. We would like to highlight five overarching issues.

One major issue across the papers relates to the stability of prosodic forms. It would be convenient if meaningful prosodic forms were always realized in the same way, but of course, as already noted, things are not this simple. Classic examples are the issue of truncation and compression of phrase-final f0 movements or, more generally, the way intonational forms can stretch to cover the necessary time span or adjust to align with the phonetic structures of stressed syllables (Arvaniti, Ladd & Mennen Reference Arvaniti, Robert Ladd and Mennen1998, Wichmann, House & Rietveld Reference Wichmann, House, Rietveld and Botinis2000, Atterer & Ladd Reference Atterer and Ladd2004, Rathcke Reference Rathcke2016). In this special issue, Francisco Torreira and Martine Grice's paper illustrates how complex this can be: they describe a meaningful melody that may, depending on utterance length, be partly truncated, and that contains a tonal component that may, depending on the lexical content, surface as pitch accent or as a boundary tone.

Aoju Chen and Lou Boves’ paper is also relevant to the question of stability of form. The authors find that the intonational expressions of sarcasm vary with the syntactic form of the vehicle utterance. For example, sarcasm seems to be expressed with low pitch on a focused word in tag questions but not in declaratives. Along similar lines, Clara Huttenlauch, Ingo Feldhausen and Bettina Braun find that, for two pragmatic functions, greeting and seeking confirmation, the prosodic forms observed vary with the lexical content used. Thus the same function was realized differently when using a pure greeting, hola ‘hello’, versus when calling by name, for example Manolo. Not only do Huttenlauch et al. find differences in which intonation contours are most frequently used, they also find differences in spectral tilt (as a measure of voice quality) and pitch range. They argue that these facts are incompatible with models that assume a simple, direct form–function mapping in prosody.

The second issue is that of the role of context. While it would be convenient if prosodic forms had consistent meanings across contexts, variations in nuance and implications are known to be common (see Bolinger Reference Bolinger1989), which brings many well-known challenges. But Rasmus Persson's work on the French ‘accent d' insistance’ goes much further: he presents a meaningful prosodic form whose meaning appears to shift entirely depending on the discourse context: varying from conveying simple indication of receipt of new information to intensification and to self-correction. He reaches a radical conclusion: that intonational units have no inherent meanings at all, instead serving merely as a kind of connecting elements or hubs between other semiotic resources, including the sequential context and the lexical items chosen. If this is true – that is, if the common practice of ascribing context-independent meanings to prosodic forms is inadmissible – our field faces huge challenge, not least because of the infinite diversity of contexts and pragmatic goals. Nevertheless, we see hope. While a complete theory of meaning is a boundless task, the aspects of meaning relevant to prosody are more limited, and are heavily skewed to social and interactional meanings. With increasing attention to these aspects of language, we hope to see continuing progress towards effective modeling of context.

The third issue we would like to highlight is that of methods. Readers will find in these papers a broad sampling of methods and approaches to prosody, reflecting major differences in evidence gathering, reasoning, and conclusions. Each of our authors has adapted, combined, and extended standard methods to better suit their aims, but each is explicit about the fact that there are still limitations with the techniques used. At the same time, it is clear that all have an equally-strong awareness of the limitations of rival methods. The problem comes when trying to integrate the insights arising from different approaches. Today this is a daunting task: Persson (Section 6) goes so far as to suggest that ‘interactional linguistics and intonational phonology may be dealing with different empirical realities’ because of methodological differences. But as scholars we should not accept this: our challenge is to close the gaps, and discover the underlying truth, that today we are only glimpsing from a few different angles. We hope readers will be inspired to develop new, integrative approaches to the study of prosody, or otherwise work to help put the various findings into one overarching big picture.

The fourth issue is that of the relation between intonation and the rest of prosody. Historically pitch has been given priority, with other prosodic features receiving less attention. Recently a radically opposite view has become common. For example, in the prosodic-constructions approach to description (Hedberg, Sosa & Fadden Reference Hedberg, Sosa and Fadden2004; Ogden Reference Ogden, Barth-Weingarten, Reber and Selting2010, Reference Ogden and Niebuhr2012; Day-O'Connell Reference Day-O'Connell2013; Niebuhr Reference Niebuhr2013b, Reference Niebuhr, Skarnitzl and Niebuhr2015; Rao Reference Rao2013; Ward & Gallardo Reference Ward and Gallardo2017), pitch features have no special status; instead they are one facet among others. Some recent models of aspects of prosodic perception focus on how various acoustic parameters may merge into a much smaller number of perceptual qualities, and how parameter trade-offs within this merger are organized. Examples include the intensity-weighted tonal center of gravity of Barnes et al. (Reference Barnes, Veilleux, Brugos and Shattuck-Hufnagel2012), and the Contrast Theory of Niebuhr (Reference Niebuhr, Asu and Lippus2013a). It is also the case that in speech technology essentially all applications that involve prosody use multi-stream modeling. For example, automatic recognition systems of social (pragmatic) signals in speech invariably obtain the ‘highest prediction accuracies . . . by combining many features’ (Litman & Forbes-Riley Reference Litman and Forbes-Riley2006: 586). Regarding this question, of the relation between intonation and the rest of prosody, the papers in this special issue take a middle ground. They all start with observations about intonation, but they also consider how other prosodic elements relate and contribute. Looking ahead, finding ways to integrate insights and models derived from intonation-centric approaches with those from comprehensive approaches will be a challenge.

The fifth issue is that of overcoming or leveraging the essentially bidirectional nature of inquiry in this area. Going back to the two-sided coin analogy, Torreira and Grice start with the pragmatic side, with the function of signaling obviousness, and by diligent examination of the associated forms, discover a pattern of variation that they might never have seen if they had focused entirely on the side of forms. Persson starts from the other side of the coin, focusing on one form, namely salient-initial/low-primary accent, and by diligent examination of the associated functions, in actual dialog, also discovers something unexpected. We foresee an era of rapid evolution in the study of the prosody, as more researchers more thoroughly examine both sides of the coin.

3 Outlook

This decade is an exciting time for prosody: we have new tools, new methods, and new needs, but also some of the same knotty problems in modeling.

In five-to-ten years, we expect that things will look very different. We will have models which are both theoretically satisfying and practically useful, both suitable for big-data analyses and accurate for describing specific productions, both easy to understand and empirically testable. It will not be easy getting there, not least because of the challenges raised by the papers in this special issue, which we hope will inspire and incite discussion and progress, but it will be a lot of fun.