Melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in northern German spontaneous speech
-
José Torregrosa-Azor
and
Dolors Font-Rotchés
Abstract
The present paper deals with the description and characterization of the melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in northern German spontaneous speech from an intonation and semantic-pragmatic point of view. This research has been carried out based on 246 absolute questions from spontaneous speech settings by multiple speakers of different gender, age, and education by applying the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) method developed by Cantero (2002, Teoría y análisis de la entonación. Barcelona: Ediciones de la Universidad de Barcelona.). As a result, we found five intonation patterns for absolute questions in German: falling final inflection, rising final inflection, rising-falling final inflection, high nucleus final inflection and rising body and final inflection. The first three have been previously defined by researchers using the ToBI method, while the fourth and fifth patterns had not, to date, been described in this context. In addition to defining the melodic features of each one in spontaneous speech, we have also contributed to providing the different pragmatic meanings discovered in the various contexts in which each pattern appears.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness by research project Analysis of Speech and Teaching Models (FFI2013-41915-P). The authors also would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the Assistant Editor Ann Kelly for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Explaining asymmetries in number marking: Singulatives, pluratives, and usage frequency
- The typology of property words in Oceanic languages
- Not that I know of: A polarity-sensitive construction
- Melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in northern German spontaneous speech
- Why is children’s interpretation of doubly quantified sentences non-isomorphic?
- On the interplay of object animacy and verb type during sentence comprehension in German: ERP evidence from the processing of transitive dative and accusative constructions
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Explaining asymmetries in number marking: Singulatives, pluratives, and usage frequency
- The typology of property words in Oceanic languages
- Not that I know of: A polarity-sensitive construction
- Melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in northern German spontaneous speech
- Why is children’s interpretation of doubly quantified sentences non-isomorphic?
- On the interplay of object animacy and verb type during sentence comprehension in German: ERP evidence from the processing of transitive dative and accusative constructions
