Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The particular phonological constituent structure assumes for an English intonation contour, distinguish between two general structural aspects of the pitch pattern that are interpretationally relevant. Pitch accent placement, to the extent determined by interface constraints, governed by intraclausal focus structure. The present study limited in addresses the question of tonal meaning for only a subset of English tones, in only a subset of the clausal positions. The present study goes beyond earlier works, within the confines of its empirical domain, examining the intonational possibilities, and the interaction of tonal with lexical and contextual factors. The term 'question' encompasses two overlapping sets of utterances: first, those which are syntactically defined interrogatives; and second, the utterances which the pragmatic force of questions, regardless of whether or not the syntactic structure identify interrogatives.