Abstract
Abstract In this paper I discuss some issues of the prosody/pragmatics interface from a pragmatician’s point of view. Among the questions that can be addressed, I focus on the following: How can we distinguish linguistic from non-linguistic aspects of prosody? Do all prosodic differences contribute to the same level of representation? What are the implications of the connection between prosody and interpretation for the general architecture of the language faculty and its interaction with other cognitive subsystems? Cognitive pragmatics can provide very useful analytical tools to answer these questions, such as the notion of procedural meaning (i.e. the linguistic encoding of processing instructions) and the distinction between three levels of representation (propositional explicatures, higher-level explicatures and implicatures). In this view, conventionalized prosodic patterns guide the hearer towards the intended interpretation by systematically constraining the interpretation in various levels. This includes grammatical distinctions, but also indications about illocutionary force, propositional attitude and the connections with the context.
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