Intonation and Its Parts

The traditional attempts to identify grammatical functions of intonation have recently been supplemented by attempts to identify holistic lexical functions. One such, proposed by Liberman & Sag 1974 and by Sag & Liberman 1975 is a ‘contradiction contour’ having the general shape . with the sentence accent normally at or near the lowest pitch. This contour, as an exemplar of the theory of intonational wholes, is examined in the light of an alternative theory of abstract meanings attached to rises vs. falls. ‘Contradiction’ is seen as a contextual inference from the more abstract meanings.