Neutral means that the speaker has a neutral attitude toward what he is saying. Citation refers to an intention to highlight a phrase or word. Expectation means that the speaker will speak as though his utterance could be predicted by the listener. Surprise is how a speaker would communicate surprise to the listener. Contrast involves a pronunciation which highlights a difference in meaning with a similar word or phrase.
Precision means that the speaker pronounces the word more carefully than usual.
These then are six ways of pronouncing an utterance, and for the purposes of the demonstration, of pronouncing a single word 'cat' at the end of a sentence. The device is intended to show the use of a decision procedure to select the pronunciation rule corresponding to one of these variants by actively looking for the information required to make the decision. Instead, it evaluates the relationship between the factors involved in arriving at a final selection. The reason for this is that the use of non-linguistic information concerning environment is not a matter of binary choice. The expression of surprise, for example, is scalar, and does not necessarily exclude expressing other attitudes at the same time.