Caudal, P.; Mailhammer, R. Linear Lengthening in Iwaidja: An Event-Quantifying Intonation at the Phonology to Semantics/Pragmatics Interface. Languages2022, 7, 209.
Caudal, P.; Mailhammer, R. Linear Lengthening in Iwaidja: An Event-Quantifying Intonation at the Phonology to Semantics/Pragmatics Interface. Languages 2022, 7, 209.
Caudal, P.; Mailhammer, R. Linear Lengthening in Iwaidja: An Event-Quantifying Intonation at the Phonology to Semantics/Pragmatics Interface. Languages2022, 7, 209.
Caudal, P.; Mailhammer, R. Linear Lengthening in Iwaidja: An Event-Quantifying Intonation at the Phonology to Semantics/Pragmatics Interface. Languages 2022, 7, 209.
Abstract
This paper investigates the meaning of a specific intonation contour found in the Northern Australian language Iwaidja called Linear Lengthening Intonation (LLI). Using an experimental field work approach, we analysed approximately 4,000 utterances. We demonstrate that the semantics of LLI is broadly event-quantificational as well as temporally scalar. LLI imposes aspectual selectional restrictions on the verbs it combines with (they must be durative, i.e. cannot describe ‘punctual’, atomic events), and requires the event description effected by said verbs to exceed a contextually-determined relative scalar meaning (e.g., a ‘typical duration’ à la (Tatevosov 2008)). Iwaidja differs from other Northern Australian languages with similar intonation patterns (see e.g. (Bishop 2002: 2002; Simard 2013)), in that it does not seem to have any argument NP-related incremental or event scalar meaning. This suggests that LLI is a decidedly grammatical, language-specific device; not a purely iconic kind of expression (even though it also possibly has an iconic dimension).
Keywords
Linear Lengthening Intonation; Iwaidja; Australian languages; scalarity; semantics pragmatics; discourse structure
Subject
Social Sciences, Language and Linguistics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
