Contexts such as “Guess what happened yesterday” lead to expectations as to how unusual and exciting the content of a following utterance will be. This paper investigates how speakers encode this pragmatic meaning in their productions and further evaluates the findings from the listeners’ perspective. Contexts in which the speaker is required to make information exciting for the listener lead to target words being made more prominent, with more frequent use of rising accents and larger rising tonal onglides than information placed in a neutral or ordinary context. Conversely, ordinary information is made less prominent by means of fewer and smaller rising onglides as well as more and larger falling onglides. Individual speakers convey this information in different but systematically compatible ways, supporting a view of intonational phonology that integrates qualitative pitch accent categories and quantitative phonetic parameters. Listeners’ ratings of the contexts and the production stimuli confirm the interpretation of the intended meanings and the role of the tonal onglide: A large rising onglide (as in L+H*) on the target word clearly leads to the interpretation of unusual/exciting information, whereas a small rising onglide (as in H*) or falling onglides (as in H+!H* and H+L*) do not.

诸如“猜猜昨天发生了什么”之类的语境会导致人们对接下来的话语内容会有多么不寻常和令人兴奋的预期。本文研究了说话者如何在他们的作品中编码这种语用意义，并从听众的角度进一步评估这些发现。要求说话者使信息让听众兴奋的语境导致目标词更加突出，与放置在中性或普通语境中的信息相比，更频繁地使用升调重音和更大的升调上滑音。相反，通过越来越少的上升趋势以及越来越大的下降趋势，普通信息变得不那么突出滑行。个别说话者以不同但系统兼容的方式传达此信息，支持整合定性音高重音类别和定量语音参数的语调音系观点。听者对上下文和产生刺激的评分证实了对预期含义的解释和音调上滑音的作用：目标词上的一个大的上滑音（如在 L+H* 中）显然会导致对不寻常/令人兴奋的解释信息，而小的上升沿滑行（如 H*）或下降的沿滑行（如 H+!H* 和 H+L*）则没有。