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Machine Learning Facilitated Investigations of Intonational Meaning: Prosodic Cues to Epistemic Shifts in American English Utterances Authors: Veilleux, Shattuck-Hufnagel, Jeong, Brugos, Ahn This work analyzes experimentally elicited speech to capture the relationship between prosody and semantic/pragmatic meanings. Production prompts were comicstrips where contexts were manipulated along axes prominently discussed in sem/prag literature. Participants were tasked with reading lines as the speaker would, uttering a target phrase communicating a proposition p (e.g., “only marble is available”) to a hearer who had epistemic authority on p. Prompts varied whether the speaker’s initial belief (prior bias) was confirmed (condition A: bias=p) or corrected (condition B: bias=¬p); this meaning difference was reinforced by response particles (A: “okay so” vs. B: “oh really”) preceding the target phrase. Over 475 productions were annotated with phonologically-informed phonetic labels (PoLaR). To model many-to-many mappings between features (prosodic form) and classification (sem/prag meaning), Random Forests were designed on labels and derived measures (including f0 ranges, slopes, TCoG) from 299 recordings — classifying meaning with high accuracy (>85%). RFs identified condition-distinguishing prosodic cues in both response particle and target phrases, leading to questions of how/whether functionally-overlapping lexical content might affect prosodic realization. Moreover, RFs identified phrase-final f0 as important, leading to deeper edge-tone explorations. These highlight how explanatory ML models can help iteratively improve targeted analysis. 

There is an ongoing debate regarding how imperatives convey speaker endorsement. One line of approach builds it into the imperative meaning. Another posits weaker meanings. Indifference uses, like 'Go right! Go left! I don't care!', pose a challenge to the endorsement account. We reconcile the endorsement approach with such uses and argue that they can reduce to the speaker endorsing disjunctive prejacents, which results from one imperative operator taking a list of prejacents under its scope. This analysis predicts that intonational patterns that signal lists will facilitate disjunctive interpretations. We test and confirm this prediction in an experimental study.