New trends in English intonation

"Are you asking me or are you telling me?" was the title of the paper written about fifty years ago. This is the question people speaking English may ask each other today when they hear each other's intonation.

Contrary to the general expectations some speakers of English use a rising tone in statements and wh-questions. Alan Cruttenden (1968) com­mented on the Northern Irish incidence of a rise in statements calling his paper "the myth of a fall". He continued the discussion in his book (1986) on intonation of Australian young people who also tend to raise their pitch at the end of statements. And, finally, there are similar cases of rises mentioned by J.C. Wells (1982), D. Bolinger (1998) and D.R. Ladd (1996), all concerning American speech.

This is what David Crystal writes in "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language": "Why is it used? Why should a statement end with an intonation pattern which would normally be associated with the function of a question?" {Crystal 1995:249). The author then presents the descriptive findings of a sociolinguistic study in Australia and New Zealand (based on D. Britain & J. Newman 1992):

• Women used it twice as much as men.

• Teenagers used it ten times more often than people over 20, and people in the 20-30 age group used it five times as much as those over 70.

• Working-class people used it three times as much as middle-class people.

• Ethnic minorities used it two to three times more often than members of the majority group. Maori speakers, for example, used it up to 50 per cent more than Europeans.

The two kinds of explanation for the phenomenon are:

• One focuses on the social differences and suggests that the tone is preferred by the less powerful members of society.

• An alternative explanation is that the high rising tone is used as a natural and widespread feature of conversational interaction. A speaker might introduce it for any of several discourse reasons - as an informal check to see if the listener has understood, as a request for empathy or some other form of feedback, or even as an indication that the speaker has not yet finished speaking (Crystal 1995:249).

D.R. Ladd, it appears, also views the incidence of a rise as an asking-for-feedback device. Ladd claims that the speaker is making a statement but at the same time is asking for feedback from the listener. One common context for this use is in narrative or other monologue, in which speakers often repeatedly use a high-rising contour to invite acknowledgement from the listener; the intonation is a kind of shorthand for "Do you follow me?"

Two other contexts are transaction-openers and answers to WH-questions:

A: I have an appointment with Dr Mac,millan. B: What's your /tame? A: William Jarvis.

In both A's opener and his reply to WH-question, the rising intonation means something like Are you expecting we? Thus the general meaning of 'request for response' is present in this use of rising intonation. According to D.R. Ladd, this use is not found in most British varieties, and it strikes many British speakers as wheedling or insistent.

D.R. Ladd claims we are dealing with the "same" tune across varieties of language. The only difference is in the function of the tune: in one variety, British Standard English, it is used with syntactically marked questions, while in the other two, American and Australian English, it is used with statements.

However, British Standard English and British Regional Standards present, as we have already demonstrated in the previous section, a number of different intonation features.

A specific case in point is provided by the intonation typically used in statements in "Urban North British" (UNB) English. UNB is the cover term produced by Cruttenden for the varieties of English spoken in Belfast and Glasgow (and Northern Ireland and Western Scotland generally), together with the varieties of several major English cities, in particular Birmingham, Liverpool, and Newcastle. Intonationally, the most conspicuous characteristic of these varieties is that the ordinary intonation on statements is rising or rising-falling (Knowles 1974; Cruttenden 1986).

As Cruttenden makes clear, the UNB rises are not at all the same as the rises used in North America or Australian English on statements requesting feedback, discussed in previous section. There are both pragmatic and phonetic differences.

Pragmatically, the American/Australian rising statements represent a linguistic choice: statement intonation in these varieties can be either rising or falling in many contexts, and the choice of contour conveys a nuance. This does not appear to be true for the UNB varieties: the rise is not, as in American and Australian English, basically a question tune being used to add a nuance to a statement, but rather the ordinary way to pronounce a statement.

Phonetically, the American/Australian rises begin high on the accented syllable and keep rising to the end of the phrase. This differs in two ways from the UNB pattern: first, the accented syllable in the UNB rises begins quite low relative to what precedes; second and perhaps more importantly, the rise on the accented syllable is usually followed by a distinct fall, some-; times but not often all the way to the bottom of the speaker's range.

This analysis disagrees with Bolinger's interpretation of UNB statement rises (Bolinger 1958:510), both pragmatically and phonetically. Bolinger suggests that statement rises in UNB English (and other languages that have them) represent "a fossilisation of a conventionalised but formerly meaningful questioning attitude" — that the rise had a value at one time, now lost. D. Bolinger bases his suggestion on the American rising tune discussed in the previous section:

"Many speakers of American English in giving a running account of something will use exactly this kind of terminal rise at the end of practically every sentence — clearly the channel-clearing device that says, in effect, 'Are you listening?', for unless one gives a sign of attention, the monolog comes to a halt. It would not be hard to imagine such a habit becoming a contagion, after which, the interlocutors weary of giving the countersign, the language could be said to have a rising intonation as a mark of clause terminals in general" (Bolinger 1978).

D.R. Ladd argues that the two kinds of rises are quite different phonetically and functionally. Some UNB varieties have a clear distinction between question and statement tunes. He believes that the various rising statement intonations in different varieties of English present a clear illustration of the distinction between semantic differences (American and Australian English use the high rising contour in a way not found in British English) and systemic differences (UNB statement intonation is rise-falling, a tonal sequence that does not occur in RP or American English).

According to D.R. Ladd, it should not be difficult in principle to distinguish semantic differences — different uses of the same tune — from systemic differences — different tunes for similar functions. However, we have to disagree here, as in the case of the rise-falling intonation we deal with a modification of the tune (tone) which, according to other sources, is quite common in North American statements, and was attested as a structural, realizational difference {Shakhbagova 1982).

We have quoted from most of the sources available at the moment to show how scholars differ on a simple question of "Are you asking me or are you telling me?" It would appear that very often we do both at a time. Telling a story or telling one's name we, at the same time, want to know if we are being expected, or listened to, and may have a good chance to continue the conversation.

Also it would be a good idea for every student of English to be more sensitive to these simple questions and make one's own observations in case of doubt. For example, in Yes-No questions, according to Roger Kingdon, a high rise is expected. J.D. O'Connor and G. Arnold suggest that a low rise is just right. Then there is an opinion of another authority, David Brazil, who claims that fall-rise is the neutral case of a question, while a low rise is too demanding. Alan Cruttenden also argues that a high rise suggests surprise. D.R. Ladd categorizes a fall-rise as British and a high rise as American.

What are the choices for a student of English in intoning a general question? There are three at least: high rise, low rise, fall-rise. What is the strategy of the student facing the difficulty of tone selection?

The answer is to observe and make your own choice. We have used the script of the film "Bridget Jones's Diary" with the intonation notation marked by an expert in English phonetics. The aim was to see which tones are actually used in Yes-No questions. The results are as follows: 68% end in a rise and 32% end in a fall. Among the rising tones half are pure rises and half are fall-rises. Men and women practically intone their questions identically. Thus we have found that the rising pattern in a question still prevails (68%) but statistically the initial options of a rise, a fall-rise and a fall distribute evenly: each accounts for a third of the cases (around 33%).

Among the WH-questions the basic falling tone dominates even more impressively: 88% falls vs. 12% rise. Here women slightly go ahead of men in using rise-ending tones by 7%.

Thus we can conclude that in actors' speech in middle-class roles they perform the basic types still prevail, while the opposite direction tones express nuances which we can infer from the situation. Rises and fall-rises, for that matter, compete and appear to have equal status at the moment in Yes-No questions. And that's that, as the story says. When in doubt, don't stop to observe and check for yourselves.

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