Prosodic Disambiguation in English and Italian

Abstract

It is widely believed that syntactic and semantic ambiguities, such as the scope of negation and quantifiers, the association of focus sensitive operators, and the attachment of prepositional phrases, adverbials, and relative clauses can be disambiguated intonationally (Jackendoff, 1972;Bolinger, 1989;Renzi, 1988). While there has been some experimental investigation of the role prosody plays in influencing hearers’ interpretation of certain syntactic ambiguities in English (Altenberg, 1987;Beach, 1991;Price, Shattuck-Hufnagel & Fong, 1991, there has been little empirical study of these phenomena in other languages, and even less cross linguistic research. In this paper we present results of a study designed to compare the mechanisms speakers employ to disambiguate syntactically and semantically ambiguous utterances in English and Italian. We wanted to discover, first, whether phenomena believed to be intonationally disambiguable would be so disambiguated by naive subjects. Second, we wanted to see whether speakers of two languages in which prosodic features such as phrasing and pitch accent can be freely varied to convey differences in meaning would use those features similarly or not.