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Article In: Pragmatics & Cognition: Online-First Articles

Pragmatics and prosody in production and comprehension of scopally ambiguous sentences

Evidence from Russian

 | Dartmouth College
 | Nazarbayev University
 | HSE University
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Abstract
We analyzed scopally ambiguous Russian sentences containing sentential negation and NPs with the quantifier ‘all’ following the verb. While prosody has been shown to disambiguate scope in artificial examples lacking pragmatic cues, we aimed to examine its role in real usage, including production and comprehension of natural sentences. For production, we collected examples from the Multimedia Russian Corpus and analyzed their interpretations and prosodic properties. For comprehension, we conducted an experiment with recorded sentences based on corpus phrases, featuring both natural and unnatural prosodic patterns. Participants chose between scopally different interpretations using prosodic and pragmatic cues. Our findings reveal that although prosody can mark scope and affect interpretation, it is not consistently used in naturalistic data. In production, stress often conveys emphasis and contrast rather than scope. In comprehension, interpretation is influenced more by pragmatic feasibility than by information structure expressed through prosody.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Some relevant features of Russian
    • 1.2Prosody and ambiguity
    • 1.3The present study
  • 2.Corpus study of production
    • 2.1Method
    • 2.2Results: Interpretations and prosodic patterns
    • 2.3Discussion: Interpretations and prosodic patterns
    • 2.4Results and discussion: Pragmatic disambiguation
  • 3.Experimental study of comprehension
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Analysis
    • 3.5Results and discussion
  • 4.General discussion
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Ethics statement
  • Conflict of interest
  • Author contributions
  • Data availability statement
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
References (54)
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