Constructing a context with intonation

It is widely accepted that intonation makes a significant and systematic contribution to utterance interpretation. Less well understood are the linguistic or paralinguistic mechanisms by which the meaningful effects we identify and describe are communicated. Recent work by Gussenhoven (2002) illuminates how these functions may be reconciled by appealing to partly grammaticalised ‘biological codes’. An explanatory pragmatic framework for analysing intonational meaning from the hearer's perspective may be found in Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995), which allows linguistic expressions to be coded for either conceptual or procedural meaning (Blakemore, 2002). This paper investigates what procedural coding, typically involving constraints on inferential processes, might look like when applied to intonation. Discussion centres on the structure-building properties of intonation together with an examination of the range of functions associated with one particular tonal pattern, the high rising tone (HRT).