The event will be held via Zoom: ubc.zoom.us/j/64763345823.The passcode is 635410. (The meeting ID is 647 6334 5823.)
Molly Babel, Megan Keough, Elise McClay and Lisa Matthewson will present a research seminar entitled “Being Bossy: Intonational meaning in English imperatives”.
Abstract: English imperatives can be used to convey a range of different speech acts, including orders, requests, advice, and permission. Several authors have claimed that the different interpretations of imperatives are disambiguated by intonational contours, but so far the claims have not been supported by full phonetic studies. In this talk we report on a series of experiments in which we found evidence that English speakers produce (strong) ‘command’ and (weak) ‘advice’ imperatives differently, and that listeners use some production cues in order to disambiguate the different readings in perception. However, we also find more variability than predicted in the literature in prosodic contours produced for both types of imperatives. The most robust signals of imperative function seem to be “macro” settings including overall speech rate and pitch height. This suggests that while prosody is used to disambiguate meaning, it is not (always) a simple matter of assigning meaning to particular intonation contours.