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The High Rising Terminal in the Intonation System of the Modern English Language

Paper · 2024 · K. N. Sypacheva and E. A. Shamina

Summary

This study asks whether the High Rising Terminal (HRT), a rise at the end of statements also called Uptalk, is changing the intonation of modern English and whether those changes are shared across accents. The authors compared three varieties: RP (the codified British standard), Australian English, and Belfast English from Northern Ireland. Their material was spontaneous dialogue recorded from native speakers. They examined HRT contours acoustically, and they read the surrounding lexical and communicative context to work out what each rise was doing. The main finding is a function of the HRT in RP that classical accounts such as O'Connor's system do not describe: using the rise to establish and keep contact with listeners. The listener can be the person in the conversation or an unseen audience, as on radio or in video interviews. The authors also report similar acoustic traits across the three accents and suggest that this contact function is common to all of them. The work matters because it shows the "standard" accent is changing too. It also shows that older textbook descriptions of English intonation no longer fit current speech.

Key points

  • Three varieties are compared: RP, Australian English, and Belfast English. The data are spontaneous dialogues, and functions are assigned through acoustic analysis plus contextual analysis.
  • Background claims from the paper:
    • RP speakers make up only about 3–5% of the UK population.
    • Standard Southern British (SSB) is gaining ground.
    • In SSB, the Low Drop tends to sound haughty, and the High Drop is preferred for statements.
  • HRT functions described in earlier work include:
    • inviting a verbal or nonverbal response;
    • taking the lead in a conversation;
    • signalling doubt.
  • One hypothesis traces the HRT to Australian speech of the 1960s–70s, when speakers used it to check that immigrants had understood them. The contour is reportedly absent from news reading, where no face-to-face exchange is possible.
  • The authors acknowledge a limitation: they assigned functions from context and subjective judgement. They call for perception experiments with listeners from several varieties. The reference list includes the CABank English GCSAusE Corpus.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The same surface form, a final rise on a declarative, can carry different functions depending on the variety and the situation, so form should not be mapped to function one-to-one.
  • I2. The addressee of an utterance may be a passive, unseen audience rather than the direct interlocutor, as with broadcasters keeping in touch with listeners.
  • I3. Functions are assigned by combining a measurable signal (the acoustic contour) with a reading of the lexical and communicative context, rather than from either one alone.
  • I4. The authors explicitly mark their functional labels as subjective and propose independent perception tests as validation.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): The speech-act classifier in prag should not label every statement that ends in a rise (or a "?" in a transcript) as a question; it should also consider a contact-seeking or feedback-seeking act, chosen by context.
  • I2 (frames): Speech-act frames could separate the direct addressee from an overhearing audience, which would help when interpreting interviews, broadcasts, or narrated tales.
  • I3 (learn): Silver labels for pragmatic categories could require agreement between a formal cue and a context-based judgement, so that neither witness decides alone.
  • I4 (learn): Evaluation of implicature or irony labels could include a separate check by independent judges or a held-out signal, treating the annotator's own reading as unverified.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓St Petersburg UniversitySt Petersburg · Russia3 works

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 worksSpeech & spoken language · 480 works

Cite

Cite as K. N. Sypacheva and E. A. Shamina. 2024. The High Rising Terminal in the Intonation System of the Modern English Language. Discourse 10 (Дискурс 10).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.32603/2412-8562-2024-10-4-93-105

@inproceedings{sypacheva2024high,
  title = {{The High Rising Terminal in the Intonation System of the Modern English Language}},
  author = {K. N. Sypacheva and E. A. Shamina},
  booktitle = {Discourse 10 (Дискурс 10)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.32603/2412-8562-2024-10-4-93-105},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.32603/2412-8562-2024-10-4-93-105}
}

References

23 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  4. Wells J. C. English Intonation. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009. find
  5. Cruttenden A. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. 8th ed. London, NY: Routledge, 2014. find
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  10. Trudgill P. Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984. find
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  13. Lindsey G. English after RP: Standard British Pronunciation Today. Cham: Springer, 2019. find
  14. Arvaniti A., Atkins M. Uptalk in Southern British English // Proc. of Speech Prosody, Boston, 31 May – 3 Jun 2016 / Univ. of Boston, Boston. 2016. P. 153–157. DOI: 10.21437/ SpeechProsody.2016-32. find
  15. Warren P. Uptalk in English varieties // Uptalk: The Phenomenon of Rising Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016. P. 69–96. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316403570.005. ↗
  16. Frödrich K. Functions of 'Uptalk' in Australian English: A Tool to Express Humor // Australian Studies J. 2023. Vol. 37. P. 49–60. DOI: 10.35515/zfa/asj.37/2023.04. ↗
  17. Fletcher J., Harrington J. High-rising terminals and fall-rise tunes in Australian English // Phonetica. 2001. Vol. 58, iss. 4. P. 215–229. DOI: 10.1159/000046176. ↗
  18. Moritz N. Uptalk variation in three varieties of Northern Irish English // Proc. of Speech Prosody, Boston, 31 May – 3 Jun 2016 / Univ. of Boston, Boston. 2016. P. 119–122. DOI: 10.21437/ SpeechProsody.2016-25. find
  19. Grabe E., Post B. Intonational variation in British Isles // Proc. of the Speech Prosody, Aix-en-Provence, April 11–13, 2002 / Laboratoire Parole et Langage, Aix-en-Provence. 2002. P. 343–346. DOI: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2002-71. ↗
  20. Grabe E., Kochanski G., Coleman J. The intonation of native accent varieties in the British Isles: potential for miscommunication? // English pronunciation models: A changing scene / K. Dziubalska-Kolaczyk, J. Przedlacka (eds.). Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. P. 311–338. find
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  22. Нестерова Н. Г. Коммуникативно-прагматическая специфика спонтанного радиодис-курса // Вестн. Том. гос. ун-та. 2009. № 318. C. 37–40. find
  23. Снятков К. В. Коммуникативно-прагматические характеристики телевизионного спортивного дискурса: автореф. дис. … канд. филол. наук / Черепов. гос. ун-т. Вологда, 2008. Информация об авторах. Сыпачёва Кира Николаевна – аспирантка (теоретическая, прикладная и сравнительно-сопоставительная лингвистика) Санкт-Петербургского государственного университета, Университетская наб., д. 7/9, Санкт-Петербург, 199034, Россия. Автор трех научных публикаций. Сфера научных интересов: фонетика, английская интонация. Функции высокого терминального тона в интонационной системе современного английского языка 103 The High Rising Terminal in the Intonation System of the Modern English Language Языкознание Linguistics ДИСКУРС. 2024. Т. 10, № 4. C. 93–105 DISCOURSE. 2024, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 93–105 Шамина Елена Анатольевна – кандидат филологических наук (1989), доцент кафедры фонетики и методики преподавания иностранных языков филологического факультета Санкт-Петербургского государственного университета, Университетская наб., д. 7/9, Санкт-Петербург, 199034, Россия. Автор более 70 научных публикаций. Сфера научных интересов: фонетика, методикa преподавания иностранных языков, фоносемантика. О конфликте интересов, связанном с данной публикацией, не сообщалось. Поступила 16.01.2024; принята после рецензирования 14.02.2024; опубликована онлайн 24.09.2024. ↗

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