Part of
Constraints in Discourse 3: Representing and inferring discourse structureEdited by Anton Benz, Manfred Stede and Peter Kühnlein
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 223] 2012
► pp. 109–136
In this paper, we examine the status of French major continuative prosodic contours, which are mainly realised as final rises at the boundary of sentences. We show how to substantiate the common intuition that these contours convey ‘continuation’. We report empirical evidence that indicates that native speakers cannot distinguish major continuatives and questions in isolated discourse segments. We then show how to integrate continuatives into a liberal version of Asher’s SDRT. In essence, we propose that any discourse constituent bearing a major continuative (i) has a default question interpretation when taken in isolation and (ii) constrains attachments at the point where it occurs, when considered in the context of a discourse.