Daniel Buring's study provides an illuminating and ground-breaking account of the complex interaction of intonational phenomena, semantics and pragmatics. Based on examples from German and English, and centered on an analysis of the fall-rise intonation contour, a semantic interpretation for two different pitch accents--Focus and Topic--is developed. The account is based on Montagovian possible world semantics and Chomskian generative syntax. The cross-sentence, as well as the sentence internal semantic effects of these accents, follow from the given treatment.