Based on quasi-spontaneous speech data taken from a map task study designed to test Icelandic intonation, this chapter compares the intonation of declaratives and polar questions (PQs) in moribund North American (heritage) Icelandic (NAmIce), spoken by elderly speakers in Manitoba, Canada, to that of Modern Icelandic (ModIce), spoken by two age groups in Iceland. We find similarities between ModIce and NAmIce that we interpret as maintenance of Icelandic characteristics in NAmIce (e.g., L*+H L% nuclear contour in NAmIce PQs), as well as differences that we interpret as transfer from North American English to NAmIce (e.g., L* H% nuclear contour in NAmIce PQs, L*+H nuclear accent in NAmIce declaratives). These results are in line with previous research on intonation in heritage languages. We do not find pervasive differences between the two ModIce age groups.

Chapter 4 explores mood systems and structures. It concentrates on paradigmatic relations – and the ways in which these can be motivated in the grammars of English, Spanish and Chinese. This chapter foregrounds questions about the nature of functional language typology, when confronted with the diverse structural realisations of mood in three different languages. It highlights the need to focus on system rather than structure, on higher ranks rather than lower ones and ultimately on discourse semantics rather than grammar by way of establishing comparable ground whenever languages are being contrasted and compared.

The theory of common ground is an important analytical tool in linguistics and intercultural pragmatics. Common ground has applicability in the characterization of speech acts and allows for distinguishing, for example, between an assertive, which requires a dynamic common ground, and a declarative that depends more on appropriate contextual factors for a successful realization. The theory of common ground is intrinsically linked to how knowledge relates to language and how a discourse advances between interlocutors. As such, the creation and maintenance of common ground has consequences for our stance on knowledge and what we KNOW, BELIEVE, DESIRE, and our INTENTIONS for action. There are many kinds of knowledge and a relevant portion of these are framed within a discourse situation, with common ground. We discuss the interfaces and relationship between situation, context, common ground, and knowledge including cultural knowledge, drawing on the thinking of Malinowski and Firth, and others. The challenges addressed are: (a) how do we ground the notions of context and common ground and their contents, with the appropriate level of specificity? (b) how do we represent them in such a way to become operationally useful in linguistic analysis? and (c) how do we show how context and common ground contribute to utterance meaning?

A subordinate clause is one embedded somewhere within another clause. The clause immediately containing it is called its matrix clause and may or may not be the main clause of the whole sentence. Subordinate clauses often differ in their internal structure from main clauses. There are three main types: relative, comparative, and content clauses, the last being the default type.

Relative clauses often include a relative word or a subordinator in marker function and have an anaphoric relation between an element in the clause and one in a containing clause. Often a missing phrase determines the anaphoric relationship. Comparative clauses mostly function as complements to the prepositions ‘than’ or ‘as’ and lack a phrase found in a main declarative clause.

Content clauses may be introduced by a subordinator, such as ‘that’ or ‘whether’, but otherwise differ less radically from main clauses, and indeed are often structurally identical with them. Content clauses function cheifly as complements within the larger construction. Like main clauses, they have declarative, interrogative, and exclamative subtypes. Sometimes, the structure of a subordinate clause is ambiguous between two types.

Here, we look at a number of syntactic differences that are used for different pragmatic purposes, specifically the characteristic but imperfect relations between the following clause types and speech acts: declarative clauses for making statements, closed interrogative clauses for asking closed questions, open interrogative clauses for asking open questions, imperative clauses for issuing commands, and exclamative clauses for uttering exclamations. These relations exist for both main and subordinate clauses.

Declarative clauses are the basic clause type that we’ve been describing so far. Interrogatives have a number of characteristics differences, including subject–auxiliary inversion and the use of interrogative words and fronting of the interrogative phrase in open interrogatives. The exclamatives are always marked by an initial exclamative phrase that begins with either adjective ‘what’ or adverb ‘how’. Imperatives characteristically lack a subject and use the plain form of the verb. We conclude with a brief description of a few minor clause types.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine which features of the three mainEnglish sentence-types make these sentence-types compatible with theperformance of (indirect) speech acts. I am mainly concerned with formalapproaches to indirect communication and I focus on the semantics ofimperatives, the semantics of interrogatives and that of declaratives.

This contribution focuses on the basic features and the linguistic functions of intonation primarily in the standard varieties of Germanic languages including German, Dutch, English, Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. It begins with an introduction to intonation generally including a discussion of phonetic and phonological analyses of intonations, the meanings of intonation contours, and the range of data sources used in analyses. It then introduces the commonalities across utterance types in the Germanic languages and then presents the specific features of intonation in each of the languages. Some discussion of dialectal variation is also included. Research into perception – including listener interpretation of intonation contours – is also included.