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Prosodic realization and interpretation of English imperatives

Paper · 2023 · Elise McClay, Megan Keough, Molly Babel et al.

Summary

Researchers have proposed that English imperatives get different readings depending on intonation: falling contours for commands, rising for permission or advice (notably Portner 2018). Little phonetic evidence existed. The authors ran three experiments with speakers of English in western Canada, contrasting strong imperatives (commands) with weak ones (mostly advice, some permission).

  • Experiment 1: listeners matched idealized contours to the two readings.
  • Experiment 2: speakers produced both types in elicitation contexts.
  • Experiment 3: a fresh group of listeners classified those natural productions.

Final contours varied a lot from speaker to speaker and resisted reliable ToBI transcription. Even so, listeners recovered the intended reading about as well as with the idealized stimuli. The dependable cues were "macro" settings: commands came out slower and lower in pitch, along with differences at the nuclear pitch accent. The authors conclude that form maps to meaning through several redundant cues, not one tune. They tentatively suggest that prosodic morphemes may bundle rate, global pitch and accent shape.

Key points

  • The same string, e.g. "Turn on the light", can serve as command, request, advice or permission depending on context. The study narrows this to a strong/weak contrast.
  • Every speaker in Experiment 2 produced commands both lower and slower than advice, despite heavy variation in other properties.
  • In Experiment 3, only 7% of produced items were classified as intended by all listeners. 28% reached 90% agreement in the intended direction.
  • In the clearest items, strong imperatives mostly showed a level-then-fall nuclear contour, typical of declaratives. Weak ones mostly showed a rise before the fall.
  • Listeners leaned toward answering "strong" overall. Portner's semantic split is supported, but not his claim that the final contour alone carries it. Shareable materials are on OSF (osf.io/5pm3h).

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Validating a theory twice, first with idealized stimuli and then with real productions judged by new listeners, separates "can the cue work" from "is it actually used".
  • I2. Analysing only the subset with near-unanimous judgments exposes the cues that reliably carry meaning, even when the full data is noisy.
  • I3. Meaning is signalled by several redundant, individually weak cues rather than one dedicated marker, so a missing cue does not break interpretation.
  • I4. The strong reading behaves as the default and the weak reading seems to need extra marking, matching the listeners' bias toward "strong".
  • I5. Portner's split between the speaker's priority and the addressee's priority is a clean way to encode the strong/weak contrast.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Mova could test a repair rule on clean synthetic sentences and then on held-out natural text, keeping the two scores apart as a built-in control.
  • I2 (learn): when witness parsers disagree, Mova could mine rules only from fully agreed silver items, then check how well those rules extend to contested ones.
  • I3 (frames): the prag speech-act step could add up textual hints for imperative strength instead of keying on one feature, and record which hints fired as the explanation. Possible hints include "please", "if you want/like", exclamation marks and the speaker's role.
  • I4 (frames): an imperative with no softening cues could default to a command frame (speaker's priority). It would switch to an advice or permission frame (addressee's priority) only when explicit weakening evidence appears.
  • I5 (world): Mova could store the imperative's content on the addressee's to-do list along with whose priority it is. Later questions about obligation versus mere permission would then follow from the world state.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of British ColumbiaVancouver · Canada98 works · 34,805 citations🎓Simon Fraser UniversityBurnaby · Canada17 works · 4,413 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksSpeech & spoken language · 480 works

Cite

Cite as Elise McClay, Megan Keough, Molly Babel and Lisa Matthewson. 2023. Prosodic realization and interpretation of English imperatives. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.16995/glossa.9564

@article{mcclay2023prosodic,
  title = {{Prosodic realization and interpretation of English imperatives}},
  author = {Elise McClay, Megan Keough, Molly Babel and Lisa Matthewson},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.16995/glossa.9564},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9564}
}

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