The Meaning of Non-Canonical Question Intonation in English

On November 16th, Professor Nancy Hedberg presented research, co-authored by SFU Linguistics PhD student Yifang Yuan, titled The Meaning of Non-Canonical Question Intonation in English. The research analyses corpus studies of question intonation in American English and formal theories of dialogue semantics/pragmatics. You can read the full research publication using this link. 

The Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) is an international virtual conference conducted via Zoom, based at California State University, Fresno. The focus of the conference is theoretical and descriptive linguistics. 

Nancy Hedberg is the Director of the Corpus Pragmatics and Prosody Lab (CPP Lab) at SFU Linguistics. She holds a joint appointment between Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Hedberg's research interests lie in the interactions between prosody, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

Hedberg uses methods from corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, formal linguistics, and cognitive science to study the forms and meanings of linguistic constructions as they are produced and comprehended in context. She studies the prosodic meaning of questions, parentheticals and deaccenting in English, the syntactic form and discourse meanings of simple copular sentences and cleft sentences cross-linguistically, and the discourse meanings of forms of referring expressions cross-linguistically.