The Intonation of Polar Questions in North American (“Heritage”) Icelandic

Abstract

Using map task data, this paper investigates the intonation of polar questions in North American (heritage) Icelandic, and compares it to the intonation of polar questions in Icelandic as spoken in Iceland and in North American English as spoken in Manitoba, Canada. The results show that intonational features typical of Icelandic polar questions are present to a considerable extent in heritage Icelandic. Furthermore, intonational features typical of North American English polar questions can frequently be observed in heritage Icelandic, too. In addition, there is a tendency for intonational features typical of Icelandic polar questions to show up in North American English polar questions produced by speakers of heritage Icelandic more often than in North American English polar questions produced by speakers without Icelandic heritage. Focusing on intonation, the present study adds to the evidence for (bidirectional) prosodic interference between a heritage language (here moribund Icelandic) and the dominant language (here North American English).*

Keeping a Critical Eye on Majority Language Influence: The Case of Uptalk in Heritage Spanish

“…Similarly, the default rise-fall intonation of Icelandic were found in both heritage Icelandic and North American English. However, when comparing the frequency of these contours across groups, Dehé (2018) found that heritage Icelandic demonstrated significantly more low rises (56.7%) than Icelandic of Iceland (10.5%) and significantly fewer low rises than North American English (78.9%). Regarding the rise-fall contours typical of Icelandic, the opposite pattern was found; heritage Icelandic showed significantly fewer rise-falls (32.5%) than Icelandic of Iceland (65%) and significantly more rise-falls than North American English (6.3%).…”

“…Although research on heritage language intonation is scarce, studies have shown that heritage speakers are different from monolingual speakers in the distribution of pitch accents and boundary tones (Dehé 2018;Queen 2001;Rao 2016;Robles-Puente 2014), in the phonetic implementation of pitch accents (Colantoni et al 2016;Zuban et al 2020), or in the use of prosody to express pragmatic functions (Bullock 2009;Hoot 2017;Kim 2019). Some possible explanations for heritage speakers' divergent intonation patterns are the emergence of new tonal categories due to hybridization of heritage and majority language categories (Queen 2001;Rao 2016), the mix of intonation patterns or prosodic strategies found in both heritage and majority languages (Bullock 2009;Kim 2019;Robles-Puente 2014), or the use of fine-grained acoustic cues similar to or approaching those in the majority language (Colantoni et al 2016;Zuban et al 2020).…”

“…While this is a valid explanation, as we proposed above, it should be preceded by extensive research on the variation of intonation patterns in monolingual varieties in order to rule out the possibility that heritage speakers' seemingly divergent patterns may in fact be present in monolingual varieties. For instance, Dehé (2018) examined the variation in the intonation of yes-no polar questions in heritage Islandic of Canada, Icelandic of Iceland, and North American English produced by non-Icelandic Canadians. Results showed that low-rising contours typical of North American English were frequently found in heritage Icelandic, but these contours were also observed in Icelandic of Iceland.…”

The prosody of rhetorical vs. information-seeking questions in Icelandic

“…Icelandic question intonation has not yet been the focus of much experimental research. The default intonational contour of both polar questions and wh-questions is falling to a low boundary tone (L%) [13], [14], [15], [16]. According to [15, p. 323], questions with rising intonation (H%) "have special connotations" such as, for example, impatience or surprise.…”

“…For the phonological analysis, prenuclear and nuclear pitch accents, as well as boundary tones were annotated following previous intonational analyses of Icelandic in the autosegmental-metrical framework (e.g. [24], [16]; second tier from top in Figure 1). Along with H% and L%, boundaries were labelled M% (N=19), if contours ended in a mid-level.…”