Dennison Heeyeon, Schafer Amy J
Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, CA, USA.
University of Hawaii, HI, USA.
Lang Speech. 2017 Jun;60(2):174-199. doi: 10.1177/0023830917694066.
Certain English intonational contours facilitate a conversational implicature that a relevant alternative to the stated proposition does not hold true. We evaluated how frequently and how quickly naïve participants achieved such pragmatically enriched meanings when their attention had not already been drawn to a set of alternatives. Sentences with L+H* L-H% intonational contours, along with broad focus affirmative and negative counterparts, were tested in a pair of experiments. Experiment 1 revealed that most interpretations of the L+H* L-H% sentences evidenced the expected implicature, but a substantial number did not. Experiment 2 mapped the activation levels across time for the asserted state and a contradictory/implicated alternative for the same three sentence types, using a picture-naming paradigm. The results revealed that lexical negation produced a contrast in activation levels between the two alternatives at an earlier time point than the L+H* L-H% contour, and that the relative activation of the two states shifted over time for L+H* L-H% sentences, such that an intonationally implicated alternative was highly activated at a time point when the activation for the asserted meaning had declined. These results further our understanding of the pragmatic processes involved in the interpretation of negation and intonation.
某些英语语调轮廓会促成一种会话含义，即所陈述命题的相关替代选项不成立。我们评估了在未引导天真参与者关注一组替代选项时，他们达成这种语用丰富意义的频率和速度。带有L+H* L-H%语调轮廓的句子，以及宽泛焦点的肯定和否定对应句，在一对实验中进行了测试。实验1表明，对L+H* L-H%句子的大多数解释都证明了预期的含义，但也有相当数量的解释并非如此。实验2使用图片命名范式，绘制了相同三种句子类型的断言状态和矛盾/隐含替代选项随时间的激活水平。结果显示，词汇否定在比L+H* L-H%语调轮廓更早的时间点上，在两个替代选项之间产生了激活水平的差异，并且对于L+H* L-H%句子，两种状态的相对激活随时间发生了变化，以至于在断言意义的激活下降的时间点上，语调隐含的替代选项被高度激活。这些结果进一步加深了我们对否定和语调解释中所涉及的语用过程的理解。
