Intonational Meaning at the Limits of Grammar

In formal work on the meaning of English, intonation with expressive, or (allegedly) emotive, meaning has received little attention, and has been treated as separate from compositional meaning. I argue against this based on data from Japanese, showing that expressive intonation can be part of compositional meaning, hence “grammatical”. Focusing on intonation patterns occurring with the Japanese sentence-final particle yo, I propose a compositional analysis of its non-emotive meaning and argue that English intonation carries the same complex meaning—thus, it is within the scope of formal semantics/pragmatics.