Quantifying division of labour: Effects of clause type on intonational meaning
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
• The shape of sentence-final contours has largely analogous effects across declaratives and interrogatives • Excursion and duration can affect perception of speaker confidence and response expectation • Clause type sets expectations for intonational contours • Findings support a fully compositional division of labour between prosody and syntax if we associate clause types with particular conversational effects This paper reports quantifiable evidence for a clean division of labour between syntax and prosody in deriving the meaning of rising intonation. This evidence stems from two perception studies that asked participants to rate the speaker attitudes and their response expectation expressed by rising declaratives and interrogatives. Rises were manipulated by changing pitch excursion and duration which are known to affect their interpretation. One part in each study addressed the relation between the contour shape and the perception of speaker confidence or certainty, another part addressed the relation between the contour shape and the perception of response expectation. The two studies differed in whether the rise was paired with a declarative or an interrogative clause. Across clause-types, higher excursion led to lower ratings of speaker confidence/certainty and higher ratings for response expectation. For declaratives only, large duration differences also affected ratings of speaker confidence. While the patterns emerging about prosodic form-function mapping were similar across clause types, the effect sizes differed notably. This suggests that duration and excursion have clause-type-independent effects, which are moderated by default expectations of contour and clause-type combinations. Such an interpretation supports previous compositional accounts of intonational meaning that ascribe independent functions to clause type and intonation, each contributing to their conversational effects.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it