Information Structure and Intonation Realization of Ambiguous Sentences with Focus Particle 'Only'

정보구조에 따른 중의적 문장의 억양실현 양상 -초점부사 only를 중심으로-

The sentences with the same surface word order may be realized with the pragmatically different meanings, depending on the contexts under which they could appear. Semantically, their meaning differences have been explained in terms of the different information structures (Steedman 2000), whereas prosodically, they can be explained in terms of the different compositions of intonational components which make their own semantic contributions (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). In other words, the different intonation realizations of the sentences with the same word order reflect the different information structures. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the information structure and the intonational meaning by way of analysing the production of the sentences with ambiguous scopes of the English focus particle 'only'. In contrast to the previous quantitative approaches to the scopes of the focus particle 'only', two independent levels of information structure (Steedman 2000)-theme/rheme, and focus/ background-make it possible to consistently explain the intonational phenomena.