ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role of prosody in communication, i.e. the role of such things as pitch movement, tempo, and volume, which are not linguistic but which affect how utterances sound. It discusses the nature of prosodic forms and the kinds of meanings they can give rise to. It focuses in particular on stress placement and on pitch movement. It is clear that prosodic forms affect how utterances are understood. The chapter considers some questions about how this relates to linguistic semantics briefly and to pragmatics more fully. It considers examples which show how different prosodic forms interact with pragmatic principles to guide interpretations, including in disambiguation, in communicating attitudes and in giving rise to different kinds of indirect meanings.
