In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary study of the intonation system of Dublin English (DE) with a particular focus on rising tones. After analysing a corpus recorded in the framework of the PAC Program, we conclude that Dublin English has a hybrid intonation system that mixes standard English contours like falls and rises, and Northern Irish contours like rise-falls. Rising declaratives are also found (as reported by [7] and [8]), but we argue that some of these rising tones are occurrences of Uptalk and do not belong to the Urban Northern British Intonation (UNBI) that is found in Belfast. Indeed the analysis of extracts of conversations providing an ecological context makes it possible to perform a qualitative study of the interactional and pragmatic functions linked to Uptalk, and this is, as far as we know, the first study of the kind on Dublin English rising tones. We conclude that UNB rises take the form of rise-plateaus in DE. Continuation rises can be realized as rise-plateaus or low rises, while uptalk takes the form of full rises and high rises.Index Terms: Dublin English, rising contours, uptalk, interactional functions of intonation, phonetic form.
High Rising Terminals, Uptalk, or Upspeak, are stylistic rises that can be found at the end of declarative statements. They have been studied in numerous varieties of English and in other languages too. It has been shown that these rises can take on different phonetic and phonological forms and convey various pragmatic functions depending on the varieties in which they are found. The present study provides a description of these forms and functions in Dublin (Republic of Ireland). Based on a corpus of 5 speakers from the PAC-Dublin corpus that was recorded in the Irish capital in 2018, the study shows that HRTs are mainly realized with late rises and nuclear rises and that they are different from interrogative and continuative rises, notably because they are steeper than the latter. A sociolinguistic analysis of our corpus also shows that the gender of the speakers has an influence on the occurrence of the phenomenon, which does not seem to be the case for age range. This article thus provides a multidimensional analysis of stylistic rising tones in statements in Dublin.
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