UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation seeks to address the following question: can we use prosodic meaning as a metric to inform the meaning of other semantically underspecified elements? This question is asked here with respect to a class of elements called discourse particles, which speakers use to structure a conversation in an expectationally and emotionally informative way. In this work, I propose to capture the effects of both prosody and intonation in an updated view of the Table Model of discourse representation (Gunlogson 2001, 2008, Farkas & Bruce 2010), wherein pragmatic effects are entered into the conversational scorecard by way of a speaker's Discourse Commitments. This view is underlain by a causal model framework of discourse structure (Halpern & Pearl 2000), which is based off of a probabilistic notion that I define as Expectation. Once these tools have been established, I show how this framework can be used to talk in an informed way about Mirativity (DeLancey 1997, Aikenvahld 2012). In doing this, I identify three discourse particles and one intonational contour in English that make up a part of the mirative system of this language. Broadening the reach, this work also picks out two strategies of discourse navigation in German whose effects can also be explained by making reference to speaker expectations in a discourse: the modal particles ja and doch. Here, the latter constitutes an example of a mirative marker in German, whose discourse effect picks out violated expectations of the speaker, while the former is an example of a particle that signals the status quo. This dissertation also seeks to experimentally validate the claims made about the interactions between prosody and discourse particle interactions. Is introduces a series of experiments designed to test the predictions that this new view on discourse management and coherence makes. In all, I argue that what these elements have in common is their ability to enrich a discourse with pragmatic material that contributes speaker-oriented commentary on a participant's beliefs and expectations in a conversation.