The meaning of intonation in yes-no questions in American English: A corpus study
-
Nancy Hedberg
Nancy Hedberg is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. She has published on the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of referring expressions, cleft sentences, question prosody, and parenthetical verb expressions, almost always making use of corpus data.
,
Juan M. Sosa
Juan M. Sosa is retired Associate Professor of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University and is currently guest professor in the Doctoral Program in Linguistics at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil. He has worked extensively in the prosody of Spanish, French, English and Portuguese and is the author of the bookLa Entonación del Español , published in 1999.Emrah Görgülü is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language Teaching at İstanbul Sabahattin Zaim University in Turkey. His research interests include semantics and prosody-semantics/pragmatics interface. He has worked on the semantics of nouns in Turkish and the prosody and meaning of yes-no questions and wh-questions in North American English.
Abstract
In order to investigate the distinct nuances of meaning conveyed by the different intonational contours encountered in yes-no questions in English, we conducted a corpus study of the intonation of 410 naturally occurring spoken interrogative-form yes-no questions in American English. First we annotated the intonation of each question using ToBI and then examined the meaning of each utterance in the context. We found that the low-rise nuclear contour (e.g., L*H-H%) is the unmarked question contour and is by far the most frequently occurring. Yes-no questions with falling intonation (e.g. H*L-L%) do not occur frequently, but when they do, they can be classified in speech act terms as “non-genuine” questions, where one or more felicity conditions on genuine questions are not met. Level questions (e.g., L*H-L%) tend to be “stylized” in meaning and pattern with falling questions in being non-genuine. We also found that the pitch accent on high-rise questions (e.g., H*H-H%), where the final pitch contour starts high and ends higher, tends to mark information that is given in the discourse or a function word. These are syllables that would normally remain unaccented parts of the post-nuclear “tail” of the intonation phrase. This leads us to propose that many such accents are “post-nuclear accents” in the sense of Ladd 2008.
About the authors
Nancy Hedberg is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. She has published on the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of referring expressions, cleft sentences, question prosody, and parenthetical verb expressions, almost always making use of corpus data.
Juan M. Sosa is retired Associate Professor of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University and is currently guest professor in the Doctoral Program in Linguistics at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil. He has worked extensively in the prosody of Spanish, French, English and Portuguese and is the author of the book La Entonación del Español, published in 1999.
Emrah Görgülü is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language Teaching at İstanbul Sabahattin Zaim University in Turkey. His research interests include semantics and prosody-semantics/pragmatics interface. He has worked on the semantics of nouns in Turkish and the prosody and meaning of yes-no questions and wh-questions in North American English.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is
- The role of syntactic dependencies in compositional distributional semantics
- Topic marking in a Shanghainese corpus: from observation to prediction
- The meaning of intonation in yes-no questions in American English: A corpus study
- Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy
- Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- A multimodel inference approach to categorical variant choice: construction, priming and frequency effects on the choice between full and contracted forms of am, are and is
- The role of syntactic dependencies in compositional distributional semantics
- Topic marking in a Shanghainese corpus: from observation to prediction
- The meaning of intonation in yes-no questions in American English: A corpus study
- Where to place inaccessible subjects in Dutch: The role of definiteness and animacy
- Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora
