Uphill and Downhill on the Alpe D'Huez Pitch Track
Dear Mark,
I didn't hear Lance Armstrong's recent post-stage-winning press
conference, but the quote you discuss (
here)
is even more fun than you seem to have realized.
Relaxed and smiling
at a news conference, he said, "I didn't think this would be the
decisive day of the Tour," implying that it had been.
If the writer, Samuel Abt in the NYT, realized how important it was to
clarify what the implication was, then that's really amazingly
sensitive of him. You see, what Lance said,
in written form, could either imply that the day was the decisive one,
or imply the exact opposite.
The key is intonation. So listen up, Mark.
There are several different possible intonational patterns for each of the two
readings I'm talking about. The reading that the writer thinks Lance
intended is one you can get with very little stress on
think, a high pitch accent on
decisive and
Tour (or on almost any combination
of words in the propositional complement of
think), ending with a final low at
the very end of
Tour, which
may end up pronounced quite long, almost as if it were bisyllabic
.
In the following picture,
which I'm hoping your browser will render in a fixed font, the line
gives an idealized pitch track (idealized e.g. by not including the
declination that would take place throughout the sentence, and
ascii-izing the smooth interpolation between various pitch targets, and
exaggerating in places). The funny symbols under the pitch track are
what intonational phonologists term
ToBI labels, H* being a high accent
on the stressed syllables of
decisive
and
Tour, and L-L% being a
combination of low tones at the end of the prosodic phrase. These are
so-called
boundary tones, and
here are not heard as distinct from each other.
I
didn't think this would be the decisive day of the Tour
/\________________/\
__________________________________/
\
\_
H*
H*L-L%
The opposite reading, if I remember the classic source on this
matter,
is one you get if you go low on
think,
and maintain that low right up
to
Tour, which then ends with
a final high (boundary) tone. This is what is known in the literature
as a
contradiction contour.
To recognize the reading try to add to the sentence
...and it wasn't, as opposed to
...but it was for the reading
pictured above.
I didn't think this would be the
decisive day of the Tour
_
__________
/
\____________________________________________/
L*
L*L-H%
So, you see Mark, changing the intonation on an attitude report can
completely switch the implicatures. But don't trust me. The reference you need, a classic paper which I believe was the first to discuss the contradiction contour, was written by two guys who really understand this stuff:
Liberman,
M., and Sag, I., Prosodic form and
discourse function, Papers
from the Tenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, pp.
416--427 Chicago, (1974).
Posted by David Beaver at July 22, 2004 01:18 AM