{"pk":50429,"title":"Prosodic Cues in Differentiating Request and Permission Directive Speech Acts","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Directive Speech Acts (DSAs), encoded by the imperative mood, exhibit various interpretations across languages, including acquiescence, advice, requests, and commands (Searle 1979; Wilson & Sperber; Kaufmann 2012). This many-to-one relationship between form and meaning raises the key cognitive question: how do speakers disambiguate these interpretations?\nThis study examines the role of intonation in Greek imperatives, focusing on Nuclear Pitch Accent placement and boundary tones within the autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology (Pierrehumbert 1980; Ladd 1996; Arvaniti & Baltazani 2005). Recordings were controlled to isolate linguistic cues provided by prosody while minimizing extralinguistic prosodic cues related to the speaker's emotional state. Preliminary findings indicate that a rising boundary tone consistently signals a request interpretation, whereas a combination of NPA and a falling boundary tone suggests weak permission. A follow-up study incorporating contextual stimuli, describing both the speaker's and addressee's situations, is underway to examine the influence of contextual cues on interpretation.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Language Comprehension; Mood; Pragmatics; Theory of Mind"}],"section":"Member Abstracts with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8n55g1dk","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Despina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Oikonomou","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Crete","department":""},{"first_name":"Vina","middle_name":"Paraskevi","last_name":"Tsakali","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Crete","department":""},{"first_name":"Katerina","middle_name":"","last_name":"Iliopoulou","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Crete","department":""},{"first_name":"Maria","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gatsou","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Crete","department":""},{"first_name":"Benedict","middle_name":"","last_name":"Vassileiou","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Crete","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50429/galley/38391/download/"}]}