The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Donka Farkas, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  Dr. Farkas will speak on "The Interpretation of Rising Intonation in English".

This talk proposes a unified account of rising intonation in regular interrogatives, exemplified in (1), as well as in declaratives pronounced with rising intonation, exemplified in (2): 
1.a. Is Joan home?
   b. Who is home?
 
2.a. Seeing a friend come in with red cheeks: It is cold out there? 
   b. Teacher to student who has claimed that 2 + 2 = 5: Two plus two is five? 
   c. Walking up to the receptionist in a medical office:  My name is Mark Liberman? I have an appointment at 5? 
 
In pursuing a unitary account of these examples, I follow Gunlogson (2001), Rudin (2019), Goodhue (2025) a.o., and depart from Farkas and Roelofsen (2017), in treating the contribution of rising intonation as contextual. Consequently, the semantic content of rds of all stripes is taken to be dentical to that of their declarative radical. Building on Goodhue (2025), I propose that the contribution of rising intonation in all these examples is a post-supposition requiring the utterance to which it attaches to add a non-singleton issue to the discourse Table. In the case of (1), this requirement is met because of the semantics of the uttered sentence. In the examples in (2), the post-supposition is accommodated. The differences between the two questioning rds in (2a) and (2b), as well as the differences between these two utterance types and the assertive rd in (2c) are derived from pragmatic considerations concerning the context of utterance, as well as from details pertaining to the connection between the accommodated issue and the semantics of the uttered sentence. Finally, I will provide an explanation for the fact that (1) – (2b) are referred to as questions that have been asked, while (2c) is not. 

Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.