Title of the article

1.4.Clause typing

Dutch, like any other language, has lexico-syntactic means to express a range of clause types, such as statement, command, exclamation and question. Although the lexico-syntactic means are generally adequate and sufficient to express the speaker’s pragmatic intention to the hearer, several – if not all – clause types are supported by prosodic means, specifically by appropriate intonation patterns. In fact, exceptional situations may arise where there is no lexico-syntactic differentiation between the clause types, and where the speaker’s intention can only be recovered from melodic cues. For the purposes of the present experiment we have looked for a situation in which the three prosodic categories may serve as the only cue to a ternary choice among clause types, so that prosody will be exploited to the utmost, and the listener’s choice will not be co-determined by lexical and/or syntactic cues. Such a situation may be obtained in a V1 sentence, where the finite verb has been moved into the sentence-initial position._⁶ In the sentence Neemt u de trein naar Wageningen ‘Take you the train to Wageningen’ the lexico-syntactic information is compatible with at least three interpretations:_⁷

• 
  A polite imperative (Kirsner, van Heuven & Caspers, 1998)
  
• 
  A conditional clause similar in meaning to ‘If you take the train to Wageningen ...’
  
• 
  A yes/no question ‘Do you take the train to Wageningen?’
  

Which of the three readings is intended by the speaker, is expressed through prosody only. In setting up the experiment we assumed that there is no principal difference in the speech melody between a statement and a command in Dutch._⁸ Using a range of terminal pitch patterns on the single phrase Neemt u de trein naar Wageningen, we can determine the category boundaries between command (for statement), conditional (for continuation), and question without any inter­fering differences in lexico-syntactic structure.

We may conclude this introduction by summarizing the research questions that we will address:

1. 
   Are the domain-final boundaries ‘L%’ ~ ‘%’ ~ ‘H%’ contiguous categories along a single tonal dimension?
   
2. 
   Is there a one-to-one correspondence between ‘L%’ and ‘command’, ‘%’ and ‘conditional’, and ‘H%’ and ‘question’?
   
3. 
   Where are the category boundaries – if any – along the continuum between (i) ‘L%’ and ‘%’ and (ii) between ‘%’ and ‘H%’?
   
4. 
   Are the category boundaries at the same positions along the stimulus range irrespective of the binary versus ternary response mode?
   
5. 
   Are both boundaries truly categorical in the sense that there are discrimination peaks for adjacent stimulus pairs straddling the category boundaries?