Intonational cues to the identification of propositional form and speech-act type in Norwegian

This paper demonstrates how two intonational parameters – the accentedness of a verb interpretable either as a truth-conditional predicate or as a parenthetical, and the High vs. Low boundary tone at the end of the verb’s clausal complement – interact in Norwegian utterances, and how they affect the listener’s understanding of the proposition expressed and the speech act performed. Two complex sentences were used in a listening test where the participants’ task was to select either a statement or a question interpretation of each stimulus. The test result shows that in stimuli where the prosody of the main-clause verb and the terminal boundary tone give the listener contrary information about the speaker’s meaning, the former generally takes precedence over the latter, implying that co-occurring prosodic cues to utterance interpretation may differ in strength.