Building Context with Intonation

In Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (RT), the relevance of a given utterance in discourse is treated as given, while the context which the relevance of the utterance depends on is treated as a variable to be actively sought and selected by the hearer. This paper explores how the speaker’s choice of intonation — in this case Norwegian intonation — can facilitate the hearer’s inferential derivation of the contextual premisses needed to obtain the intended contextual effects.