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Judith Haan

Speaking of Questions

An Exploration of Dutch Question Intonation

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LOT phone: +31 30 253 6006

Trans 10 fax: +31 30 253 6000

3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: lot@let.uu.nl

The Netherlands http://www.let.uu.nl/LOT/

Cover illustration:

Medieval rule for the recitation of liturgical texts (Münster), taken from H. Helmholtz, Die Lehre von Tonempfindungen, Braunschweig 1877. For each of the punctuation marks the rule prescribed the appropriate inflection of the voice, corresponding with the intonation of actual speech. Thus, a comma required a minor final rise ('sic canta comma,'), a colon a minor final fall ('sic duo puncta:'), a full stop a substantial final fall ('sic vero punctum.'), and the interrogation mark final rising pitch ('Sic signum interrogationis?').

ISBN 90-76864-13-6

NUGI 941

Copyright © 2002 by Judith Haan-van Ditzhuyzen. All rights reserved. This research was funded in part by the Netherlands Organsation for Research (NOW) under grant 200-50-073.

Table of Contents

1.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND (1):

INTERROGATIVITY

1.1 Introduction 1

1.1.1 Preliminaries 1

1.1.2 Research questions 2

1.2 The notion 'interrogativity' 3

1.2.1 Interrogativity and syntax 4

1.2.2 Interrogativity and semantics 7

1.2.3 Interrogativity and pragmatics 9

1.3 Towards a definition of questions 10

1.3.1 Criteria for prototypicality 11

1.3.2 Question types 12

1.3.3 Selecting question types for investigation 19

1.4 Summary 21

2.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND (2):

QUESTIONS AND INTONATION

2.1 Introduction and outline 23

2.1.1 The study of intonational form 24

2.1.1.1 Approaches: Production vs. perception 24

2.1.1.2 Units of description 26

2.1.2 Models of Standard Dutch Intonation 27

2.1.2.1 The IPO Grammar of Dutch Intonation 28

2.1.2.2 The autosegmental model 31

2.1.3 Intonation and meaning 33

2.1.4 Summary 35

2.2 Intonation in questions 36

2.2.1 (Universal) properties 37

2.2.2 High question pitch 42

2.2.2.1 Local high question pitch: The final rise 42

2.2.2.2 Local high question pitch: Other manifestations 43

2.2.2.3 Local high question pitch: Interactions 45

2.2.2.4 Further functions of the final rise 47

ii

2.2.2.5 High question pitch: Global 48

2.2.2.6 Raised register level 48

2.2.2.7 Suspension of downtrends 49

2.2.2.8 Declination vs. downstep 49

2.2.3 Question intonation in Dutch 51

2.2.4 Question intonation: Summary 53

2.3 Sex of Speaker 54

2.4 Speaking Style 55

2.5 Hypotheses 55

2.6 General summary 56

3.

PRODUCTION (1):

QUESTION INTONATION IN READ SPEECH

3.1 A corpus of read speech: Introduction 59

3.2 Preliminary considerations 60

3.2.1 Paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic approach 60

3.2.2 Number of subjects 61

3.3 Operationalisation of the hypotheses 62

3.3.1 Final rises 62

3.3.2 Raised nuclear accent peak 62

3.3.3 Raised onset 62

3.3.4 Raised register level 64

3.3.5 Global trend 65

3.3.6 Sex of Speaker 67

3.3.6.1 Sex-related differences in speech 67

3.3.6.2 Sex-related communicative behaviour 68

3.4 Method 69

3.4.1 Material 69

3.4.2 Speakers and recording procedures 71

3.4.3 Measurements 71

3.5 Results 73

3.5.1 Final rises 75

3.5.1.1 Incidence 75

3.5.1.2 Excursion sizes 76

3.5.2 Utterance onset height 80

3.5.2.1 Paradigmatic approach 80

3.5.2.2 Syntagmatic approach 81

3.5.3 Register level 83

3.5.4 Global trend 83

3.5.5 Utterance Position 85

iii

3.5.6 Sex of Speaker 87

3.6 Discussion 87

3.6.1 Final rises 87

3.6.2 Utterance onset height 89

3.6.3 Register level 89

3.6.4 Global trend 92

3.6.5 Sex of Speaker: Results and discussion 94

3.7 General summary 97

4.

PRODUCTION (2):

QUESTIONS AND ACCENTUATION

4.1 Introduction 101

4.2 Qualitative aspects 102

4.2.1 Transcription of the material 102

4.2.2 Results 104

4.2.2.1 Preliminary remarks 104

4.2.2.2 Paradigmatic results 106

4.2.2.2.1 Initial boundary tones 106

4.2.2.2.2 Accents on wh-words 107

4.2.2.2.3 Accents on subjects 108

4.2.2.2.4 Accents on objects 109

4.2.2.2.5 Final boundary tones 111

4.2.2.3 Summary and conclusions 113

4.2.2.4 Syntagmatic results 114

4.2.2.4.1 Statements 114

4.2.2.4.2 Wh-questions 116

4.2.2.4.3 Yes-no questions 118

4.2.2.4.4 Declarative questions 119

4.2.2.4.5 Incidence of low accents 119

4.2.2.5 Summary and conclusions 120

4.3 Quantitative aspects 121

4.3.1 Introduction 121

4.3.2 Parameters 121

4.3.2.1 Accent relations and focus structure 122

4.3.3 Acoustic/auditory analysis 124

4.3.3.1 Method and measurements 124

4.3.3.2 Results 126

4.3.3.2.1 Accents on wh-words: Peaks and Excursions 126

4.3.3.2.2 Subject accents: Peaks 127

4.3.3.2.3 Subject accents: Excursions 128

4.3.3.2.4 Object accents: Peaks 130

iv

4.3.3.2.5 Object accents: Excursions 131

4.3.3.2.6 Peaks 132

4.3.3.2.7 Excursions 134

4.3.3.2.8 Sex of Speaker 135

4.4 Summary of results and conclusions 138

4.5 Discussion 139

4.5.1 Raised nuclear accent 139

4.5.2 Regression lines vis-à-vis accentuation 141

4.6 General summary 144

5.

HIGH QUESTION PITCH AND BIOLOGICAL CODES

5.1 High(er) question pitch: Q=H 147

5.2 The Frequency Code 148

5.3 Q=H: Phonetics or phonology? 150

5.3.1 Final rises 151

5.3.2 High plateaus 153

5.3.2.1 DELETION and 'meaning' 158

5.3.2.2 High plateaus: Concluding remarks 160

5.3.3 Register level 161

5.3.4 Asymmetric accent patterns 162

5.3.4.1 The Effort Code 164

5.3.5 Biological codes: Discussion 165

5.4 Information vs. confirmation: Introduction 167

5.4.1 Design and materials 168

5.4.2 Results (1): YQ vs. DQ 171

5.4.3 Results (2): DQ 173

5.4.4 Discussion and conclusions 175

5.5 Summary 177

6.

QUESTION INTONATION AND FOCUS STRUCTURE

6.1 Introduction 181

6.2 Accent and focus 182

6.2.1 Motives underlying focus ('focus types') 183

6.2.2 Focus and accentuation according to SAAR 185

6.2.3 Focus in questions 185

6.2.4 Topic-comment structure 186

6.2.5 Yes-no questions 187

6.2.6 Wh-questions 188

v

6.2.7 Discussion 189

6.2.8 Excursion: Topic-comment structure in statements 193

6.2.9 Contrastiveness: Acoustic properties 195

6.3 Focus and accent in the experimental utterances 199

6.3.1 Statements 199

6.3.2 Wh-questions 200

6.3.3 Yes-no questions 204

6.3.4 Declarative questions 206

6.3.5 Discussion 207

6.3.5.1 Accent asymmetry and focus type 207

6.3.5.2 Focus type and the Effort Code 208

6.4 Summary and conclusions 209

7.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

7.1 Introduction 213

7.2 Main observations and findings 214

7.2.1 Research questions 214

7.2.2 Hypotheses 216

7.2.2.1 Final rises 217

7.2.2.2 High onsets 217

7.2.2.3 Raised register level 218

7.2.2.4 Global trend (declination vs. inclination) 218

7.2.2.5 Raised nuclear accent peak 219

7.2.2.6 Functional Hypothesis 219

7.2.3 Additional issues 220

7.2.3.1 DQ: information question or

confirmation question? 220

7.2.3.2 Upsweep 221

7.2.3.3 High plateaus 221

7.2.3.4 Operation of universal codes 222

7.2.3.5 Focus in questions 223

7.3 Discussion: Theoretical and practical implications 224

7.4 Suggestions for further research 226

vi

APPENDIX229

REFERENCES231

SAMENVATTING245

Chapter 1

Introduction and background (1): Interrogativity

1.1 Introduction

1.1.1 Preliminaries

If speech serves the goal of human communication, the speech act of questioning does so in optima forma. More than any other act performed by speech, a question draws the addressee into interaction with the speaker. The addressee is expected to respond, commonly by agreeing or disagreeing, or by filling a specific blank in the speaker's knowledge. An addressee who fails to meet the speaker's expectation for some response is felt to break an elementary communicative rule. Thus, asking questions is a highly suitable means for starting and keeping up all kinds of interactions, such as conversations and interviews. Primarily, however, questioning is an effective means of making people communicate information that is relevant to the inquirer. Young children learn about life by continually asking questions. In adults, questioning may be inspired by various motives, ranging from a speaker's eagerness to expand his knowledge, to the more down-to-earth desire to satisfy one's curiosity, or to obtain some trivial piece of informa- tion such as the whereabouts of the post office. The present study focusses on questioning in so far as it serves these cognitive needs of the speaker1 . One might wonder whether this goal cannot be attained in a more parsimonious way, without specific interrogative strategies. In theory, the declarative sentence I would like you to specify the period in which the pyramids were built, or the imperative sentence Specify the period in which the pyramids were built would appear to have the same function as the question When were the pyramids built?. Nonetheless, languages lacking explicit lexical, syntactic and/or prosodic strategies for encoding interrogativity seem to be non- existent (cf. Chisholm 1982:278). It seems justified, therefore, to regard question utterances as a grammatical category in its own right and, consequently, as a proper object for linguistic study. 1

If, today, questioning is generally taken to serve the purpose of expanding a speaker's actual state of

knowledge, past times have also seen a claim to the opposite. The philosopher Socrates insisted that people

could obtain true knowledge, not by being taught or by asking questions, but by being interrogated. That is, a

skilled teacher was assumed to be able to guide a pupil towards knowledge that was already dormant in the

latter's soul, by systematically asking him the right questions (cf. Plato, in Meno).

CHAPTER 12

1.1.2 Research questions

The present study concerns itself with one particular aspect of questions, i.e. their intonation, in one particular language, i.e. Dutch 2 . The central research questions can be formulated as follows: • Does the discoursal function 'interrogativity' systematically correspond with specific intonational properties? • If this is the case, are these properties phonological, phonetic, or both? In the event of systematic correspondences, two further research questions present themselves. First, do the observed intonational properties of interrogativity vary as a function of the type of question they occur in? In fact, it would seem plausible for such intonational properties to be stronger as other markers of interrogativity (e.g. the presence of a question word, or the inversion of subject and finite verb) are absent. Second, do the observed intonational properties vary as a function of the speaker's sex? Empirical studies have shown (i) that female speech, apart from being higher-pitched for anatomical or cultural reasons, is more expressive, more varied and more listener- directed than male speech, (ii) that female communicative behaviour is primarily directed towards interaction whereas that of men aims at assertion and carrying out tasks, and (iii) that women are more prepared to show the dependence implied by questioning than are men. Considering that interrogativity aims at establishing interaction with a listener and that questioning gives expression to a speaker's dependence, we expect intonational properties of interrogativity to be more pronounced in female speech. Before it is possible for these research questions to be answered, prior assumptions need to be stated and the exact area of research has to be staked out. This is done in the present chapter, which deals with interrogativity as a linguistic function, as well as in chapter 2, which provides an outline of intonation in general and question intonation in particular. On the basis of these introductory chapters, hypotheses are formulated respecting global and local properties of question intonation in Dutch. In chapter 3, these hypotheses are tested with the help of a corpus of production data. Among other things, the results generate the hypothesis that the global shapes of the intonation contours might actually have resulted from specific patterns of accentuation, rather than from independent choices; this part of the analysis is presented in chapter 4. In tandem, the chapters 3 and 4 provide an overview of the intonational properties of interrogativity as observed in the production corpus. Chapter 5 extends the analysis by exploring whether the intonational features of the questions can be partly or wholly attributed to universal biological codes. That is, are these features fully arbitrary, or might they be regarded as (partially) iconic? Also, should the observed properties be analysed as phonological categories or, rather, as part of the process of phonetic implementation? Chapter 6 further elaborates on accentuation, in that it examines the relationship between the questions' accent patterns and underlying focus structures. 2

That is, the standard variety of that language.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND (1): INTERROGATIVITY3

Finally, chapter 7 reviews the results and offers suggestions for further research on the subject of Dutch question intonation.

1.2 The notion 'interrogativity'

On the outset, we should make it clear what, in the present study, is understood by the term 'question'. That is, how can questions be identified, and how do we define the communicative purpose that is being served by them? The issue of what constitutes a question is somewhat blurred by the fact that, in the literature, questions are often approached in terms of their various categories. This has spawned a wide range of (overlapping) terms and classifications, and the same category may be referred to by different names: yes-no questions have also been termed 'nexus questions' (cf. Sadock & Zwicky 1985:179), 'inversion questions' (e.g. Geluykens 1988), 'polarquotesdbs_dbs29.pdfusesText_35

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