14 Jan 2003

Aoju Chen (University of Nijmegen)

Intonation, in particular, pitch variation, is argued to signal similar meanings across languages at the level of phonetic implementation of phonological pitch contours. The meanings, paralinguistic by nature, form the body of universal intonational meanings and can be derived from three biologically determined codes: Ohala's Frequency Code, the Effort Code and the Production Code (Gussenhoven forthcoming). In our cross-linguistic investigations, we have found that although by and large languages employ the biological codes in phonetic implementation, they differ in the extent to which they use these codes. Two types of language-dependence have been identified: (1) a difference in degree of the use of these codes; (2) reversed interpretations of a given prosodic variable. We argue that these differences can be accounted for by linguistic factors regarding which languages differ from each other. Three such factors have been proposed: (1) intonational grammar regarding how a given meaning should be signalled; (2) the mean pitch range of a language; (3) the primary meaning a given prosodic variable is used to signal. In this talk, in the light of our findings on the use of the Frequency Code and the Effort Code, I will discuss the two types of language-dependence in the use of universal intonational meanings and try to account for these differences by means of the three factors, in addition to presenting empirical evidence for the universality of intonational meanings.

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