Accentuation and Active Interpretation

Hans-Christian Schmitz argues that a speaker has to utter a sentence in a way that makes the hearer perceive at least those words that are sufficient for understanding the entire sentence. In spoken language the speaker has to accentuate these words. Semantics effects of accentuation appear as epi-phenomena of their pragmatic function. The author defines a formal model for the interpretation of incompletely recognized sentences and derives a context-sensitive rule of accentuation. The rule of accentuation is experimentally evaluated.

HANS-CHRISTIAN SCHMITZ is at the University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Introduction * Optimal Accentuation * Active Interpretation * Optimal Accentuation vs. Focus Accentuation * Conclusions * Index