Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Directive Speech Acts (DSAs), encoded by the imperative mood, exhibit various interpretations across languages, including acquiescence, advice, requests, and commands (Searle 1979; Wilson & Sperber; Kaufmann 2012). This many-to-one relationship between form and meaning raises the key cognitive question: how do speakers disambiguate these interpretations? This study examines the role of intonation in Greek imperatives, focusing on Nuclear Pitch Accent placement and boundary tones within the autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology (Pierrehumbert 1980; Ladd 1996; Arvaniti & Baltazani 2005). Recordings were controlled to isolate linguistic cues provided by prosody while minimizing extralinguistic prosodic cues related to the speaker's emotional state. Preliminary findings indicate that a rising boundary tone consistently signals a request interpretation, whereas a combination of NPA and a falling boundary tone suggests weak permission. A follow-up study incorporating contextual stimuli, describing both the speaker's and addressee's situations, is underway to examine the influence of contextual cues on interpretation.