The intonation of polar questions in Italian: Where is the rise?

Abstract

Earlier studies on Standard Italian describe polar questions as being characterised by a terminal rise, as opposed to a terminal fall for statements, where a low/falling accentual movement precedes the terminal part of the contour in both sentence types. The same is generally claimed for the Northern and Central Italian varieties (including Florentine, i.e. the variety from which Standard Italian stems), whereas Southern accents are characterised by an accentual rise followed by a terminal fall, being therefore the primary cue for question in non-terminal position. However, a closer look at the existing literature on regional Italian question intonation reveals that such a geographical distribution of intonational features across Italian accents is not that clear-cut. A reason for this discrepancy might be the different speaking styles -here intended as the broad spontaneous vs. read distinction -of the spoken productions analysed. The aim of this paper is to call into question the claim that a terminal rise preceded by an accentual low/fall is the most widespread intonational feature for marking questioning across Italian accents. The goal is to provide a clearer picture of question intonation in Italian by looking at the distribution of the rise as either on terminal or non-terminal position across a large number of varieties, where speech materials have been elicited with the same methodology, and they are therefore homogeneous with respect to speaking style. Intonation analysis has been carried out on spontaneous yes-no questions extracted from the Map Task dialogues collected in the CLIPS national corpus (Corpora e Lessici di Italiano Parlato e Scritto -Corpora and Lexicons of Spoken and Written Italian) covering 15 varieties of Italian. Results of this analysis on the Northern, Central, and Southern polar questions reveals that the accentual rise prevails, and that the distribution of the rise across varieties is independent of the geography.

The intonation of the Icelandic other-initiated repair expressionsHa‘Huh’ andHvað segirðu/Hvað sagðirðu‘What do/did you say’

“…These examples are taken from a data set elicited in a map-task experiment by the author of this paper (see Section 2 for details). In order to elicit interrogative utterances and in line with common practice in map-task experiments (Anderson et al 1984, Anderson et al 1991, Helgason 2006, Savino 2012, Fletcher & Stirling 2014, among many others), the maps used by the two members of a pair playing the map-task game together were not completely identical. It was therefore not always possible for the recipient of the instructions to follow the instructions of the instruction-giver.…”

Chapter 4. The yes-no question contour in Brazilian Portuguese

“…Wollof, Danish). A similar amount of variation has been reported within languages, as yes-no questions have been found to be among the sentence types that display more intonational variation across varieties of a given language (see Savino, 2012 for Italian, Prieto et al, 2015 for Catalan, andFrota et al, 2015a for Portuguese).…”

Other-initiated repair in Italian

“…This consists of a rise on the last accented syllable of the utterance (L*+H) followed by a fall on the next unaccented syllable (H+L).8 This unaccented syllable may be final, as in a fare il barBOne (Figure 7), or not, as in CaNOnica (Figure 8), in which case the pitch stays low after it.9 This rising-falling contour is a main interrogative contour in the variety of Italian represented in my dataTrentino Italian (cf. Grice et al 2005;Savino 2012 on the same contour used in other varieties). In the larger question-response system, it is typically used to produce what linguists and phonologists of intonation refer to as "confirmation-seeking questions" (Bolinger 1989) or "checks" (Grice et al 1995;Carletta et al 1997).…”