Intonation and pragmatic interpretation of negation in Greek

In this paper I present the intonation structure of different types of negative sentences in Greek, show how this intonation structure relates to information structure, and describe the contexts in which each of the different types of negative sentences occurs, that is, what sort of interpretation each of them receives. More specifically, I show how the sentence level tunes used in negative sentences are composed of parts such as the topic and focus, and how this articulation of intonation structure relates to the context of an utterance, thus connecting intonation and information structure. The findings reported in this paper are relevant to the larger field of the interpretation of prosody. There have been many unsuccessful attempts to give some truth-conditional interpretation to prosodic entities, such as topic and focus; however, no one meaning has been found to cover all the possible uses of prosodic focus. The pragmatic interpretation of prosody advocated in this paper overcomes such problems by connecting the interpretation of prosodic constituents with the context in which they are found, not with any inherent truth-conditional interpretation.