Discourse structures and prosody as advance signs to infer speech intention

摘要

People should infer intention, emotion and goals of discourses from some kinds of cues, especially for Japanese language, which has SOV grammatical structure. In the process of language understanding, they should infer intentions positively before listening the end of a sentence or a discourse. In this study, cognition of intention was investigated using discourse expanding ways and the prosody as cues. Impression test with different discourse patterns and discourse completion test with different prosody were done about speech acts: requests, refusals and apologies. Resultssuggest that discourse structures and prosody have function to signs of the intention. Intention isexpressed and infered from discourse as a whole.