Patterns of late rising in New Zealand English: Intonational variation or intonational change?

The interpretation of prosodic variability in the context of accompanying sociophonetic cues

“…The utterance in question had a six-syllable nucleus + tail sequence (basketball stadium), and the final rise was resynthesized firstly so that its onset was temporally aligned at a range of five equally distant points from the initial accented syllable (ba-) through to the utterance-final syllable (-um), and secondly so that rises either progressed linearly towards a final high point at the end of the utterance, or involved a sharp rise followed by a high plateau. The results indicated that questions were more clearly signalled by the sharp early rise, and statements by the sharp late rise, reflecting respectively the convex and concave contours found in production data from NZE speakers (Warren, 2005).…”

“…The experiment exploited the co-variation, predominantly among younger speakers, of a closer articulation of the square diphthong (approximating the near vowel, i.e., [iɘ]) and final statement rises (uptalk) in NZE, and in particular the recent finding that earlier rises may provide a possible means of distinguishing questions from uptalk statements (Warren, 2005;Warren & Daly, 2005;Warren & Fletcher, 2016). Therefore two aspects of prosodic variability are involved-the variable use of final rises to signal either questions or statements in the same speech community, and the variability in the alignment of the final rise that is trending towards a marker that distinguishes these sentence types.…”

“…In Australian English, for instance, uptalk rises tend to start from a lower pitch, possibly as part of a fall-rise contour (Fletcher & Harrington, 2001;McGregor, 2005). Other research has suggested that question rises have earlier onsets than statement rises, in particular in NZE (Fletcher et al, 2005;Warren, 2005;Warren & Daly, 2005), South African English (Dorrington, 2010), and Southern Californian (Ritchart & Arvaniti, 2014). It should be stressed that early and late are relative concepts, and refer to the alignment of the rise onset with regard to the nuclear accent and following material, rather than in the utterance as a whole.…”

“…It should be stressed that early and late are relative concepts, and refer to the alignment of the rise onset with regard to the nuclear accent and following material, rather than in the utterance as a whole. In NZE, this alignment difference has been shown to be related to speaker age, with younger speakers more likely to distinguish between an early rise start for questions and a later start for uptalk utterances, while older speakers use later onsets for both sentence types (Fletcher et al, 2005;Warren, 2005).…”

“…In one study, Fletcher and Loakes (2010) found that the most statement-like utterances in a set of rising Australian English utterances were those with a low onset, while questions were signalled more reliably by a high onset, reflecting the production data for that variety. In a small-scale study in NZE (Warren, 2005;Zwartz & Warren, 2003), participants were asked to classify variants of a single utterance. The utterance in question had a six-syllable nucleus + tail sequence (basketball stadium), and the final rise was resynthesized firstly so that its onset was temporally aligned at a range of five equally distant points from the initial accented syllable (ba-) through to the utterance-final syllable (-um), and secondly so that rises either progressed linearly towards a final high point at the end of the utterance, or involved a sharp rise followed by a high plateau.…”