Procedures and prosody: weak encoding and weak communication

This chapter develops an earlier proposal (Clark 2007) for the semantic analysis of tones in varieties of Southern British English within a rel-evance-theoretic framework and considers some questions raised by this approach. It suggests a modification to the semantic analyses proposed, which makes them weaker, more consistent overall and more obviously in line with assumptions of the relevance-theoretic approach. The new propo-sal assumes that tones encode procedures which affect the recovery not only of (higher-level) explicatures, as previously assumed, but also of im-plicatures. The chapter considers questions raised by this approach about the nature of procedural meaning in general, about the specific procedural meanings suggested here, about how weak semantic analyses can be and about how we can test such weak semantic analyses.