Challenges in studying prosody and its pragmatic functions: Introduction toJIPAspecial issue

Abstract

The impetus for this special issue was an all-day event at the 2015 meeting of the International Pragmatics Association: The Panel on Prosodic Constructions in Dialog. This event had several motivations: (i) we have enormous data sets and tools to process them, but as a field we lack clear roadmaps for how to exploit these sets and tools to improve our understanding; (ii) we know that prosody is more than just the single stream of intonation, but we find it hard to accurately describe multistream phenomena; (iii) we have observed how prosody serves many dialog and interactional functions, but cannot yet really model how; and (iv) we have various schools of thought, each wielding its own methods, but we have difficulty reconciling and connecting their various insights.