Byron Ahn of Princeton University will present our first colloquium of the semester: “Towards Uncovering (Some) Intonational Meanings in Mainstream U.S. English” (abstract below), Friday Feb. 23 at 3:30 in ILC S211. All are welcome. A reception will follow in the department.

Abstract. While modulation of intonation is known to correspond to modulation of meaning —suggesting (something like) intonational morphemes— as a field this area is far less understood as compared to the meanings of segmental morphemes. One reason for this is that there are large questions that remain unanswered at many levels: including practical questions (how to annotate intonation), variationist ones (what sorts of mergers/splits/realizations vary and along what social variables), and formal ones (what sorts of allophony to expect), among others.

This talk will review ongoing collaborative research on U.S. English, dealing in semantic/pragmatic meanings of mirativity, previous beliefs (bias), and epistemic authority. I will detail some of the new ways we are tackling these sorts of questions, using a new intonational annotation tool (PoLaR) and robust and replicable analysis (machine learning), while still appealing to a phonological model for intonation (A-M theory) and grammatical architecture (the Y-model).