Accentuation, Uncertainty and Exhaustivity - Towards a Model of Pragmatic Focus Interpretation
Charlotte Wollermann, Ulrich Schade, Bernhard Fisseni, Bernhard Schröder, Institute of Communication Sciences, University of Bonn
This paper presents a model of pragmatic focus interpretation that is assumed to be part of a complete language comprehension model and that is inspired by Levelt's language processing model. The model is derived from our empirical data on the role of accentuation, prosodic indicators of uncertainty and context for pragmatic focus interpretation. In its present state, the model is restricted to these data, but nevertheless generates predictions.