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Recent investigations of the contribution that intonation makes to overall utterance and discourse interpretation promise new sources of information for the investigation of long-time concerns in natural-language processing. In Hirschberg and Pierrehumbert 1986 we proposed that intonational features such as phrasing, accent placement, pitch range, and tune represent important sources of information about the attentional and the intentional structures of discourse. 1 In this paper we examine the particular contribu-tion of choice of tune, or intonational contour, to discourse interpretation. In particular, we propose that a speaker (S) chooses a particular tune to convey a particular relationship between an utterance, currently perceived beliefs of a hearer or hearers (H), and anticipated contributions of sub-sequent utterances. We claim that these relationships are compositional-composed from the pitch accents, phrase …