The intonation of declarative questions in Northern British English varieties in spontaneous speech

Abstract

In this study, we analyse a sample of 76 utterances drawn from a corpus of spontaneous speech from the north of England. The selected statements present a declarative structure with different pragmatic functions (yes/no questions, echo questions, tag questions, and rhetorical questions). The objective of this study is to observe and describe the intonation of questions with a declarative structure in English from the north of England in spontaneous speech. Likewise, the pertinent bibliographic review is carried out for its subsequent discussion in view of the results obtained. The analysis is carried out in Praat, through the Melodic Analysis of Speech method (CANTERO, 2002) that allows the extraction of stylized, quantifiable and comparable melodic curves. As a result of this analysis, we obtain five different melodic that we can define as rising (21%), falling (50%), rising-falling (13%), final inflection with raised nucleus (4%), and declination and final rising inflection (12%).