Meaning and intonation : the cases of contrastive intonation and meta-linguistic negation

In this article we outline a methodological approach to the study of meaning and intonation. This approach focusses both on what speakers can produce (using production experiments) and on what hearers can perceive (using perception experiments). We show that such an experimental paradigm may yield interesting results from a semantical point of view by discussing two specific cases: contrastive accent and meta-linguistic negation. Concerning contrastive accents, we argue against the existence of a separately identifiable accent with a contrastive interpretation, though a contrastive intonation contour does appear to exist. We argue that this contour triggers a presupposition, which may be resolved using van der Sandt's anaphoric theory of presuppositions. We also present empirical evidence for the existence of a set of prosodic differences between meta-linguistic negations and descriptive negations, a distinction which is the subject of considerable debate in presupposition theory