2008/01/16

Warren, P. (2005). Patterns of late rising in New Zealand English: Intonational variation or intonational change? Language Variation and Change, 17, 209-230.

Presentation: Chris
Summary: Renee

In this paper, studies on rising intonation patterns in New Zealand English were reported. High Rising Terminal (HRT) is a dramatic rising intonation pattern found at the end of statement utterances, which is a widely studied aspect in New Zealand English and has also been observed in many varieties of English. The realization of the HRT shows considerable variation dependent on the nuclear accent and the following tail of the tone group. The speech material for the New Zealand English Database (NZSED) showed that there is a high incidence of very late HRT rises. These late rises start close to the end of a tone group, and some way downstream from the nuclear accent (e.g. the rise starts at “side” of “on the / left-hand side”). Late rises were also found at unstressed final syllables (e.g. the rise starts at “-ther” of “the fairy / godmother”).

The first study in this paper aims to explore a phonetic distinction between statement rises and question rises. A map task with 12 young native NZE speakers was carried out. Results showed that females started rising at a later point in the accent unit than males, and that statements had later rises than questions. Starting points for female and male statement rises did not differ from one another, whereas female question rises started significantly later than male question rises. Because it remains unclear whether there is any further patterning to the distribution of these late rises, further analyses were performed, in which rise onset positions were classified according to three locations: on the nuclear syllable, on a metrically strong post-nuclear syllables, or on a metrically weak post-nuclear syllable. Results showed that females used more rises than males, rises occurred more on statements than on questions, and there were more rises starting at both post-nuclear positions and the accented syllable itself.

The second study investigated different rise types on the same segmental material. Subjects listened to a set of manipulated utterances and indicated for each utterance whether it was a statement or a question. The pitch track of each utterance was manipulated to produce two groups of five experimental utterances. One is the gradient group and the other is the plateau group. The purpose of the two contour types was to investigate the importance in having an early or late rise. Results showed that there was a higher “question” response for the plateau stimuli than for the gradient stimuli, and later starting points attracted higher “statement” scores. The significant difference between the contour types indicates that it is not just the alignment of the rise start that is important, but also the shape of the rise. The plateau stimuli have a period of sustained high pitch, whereas for both contour types the early rises have a higher overall average pitch level than the late rises. A possible property that distinguishes HRT rises on statements is that they are late and dramatic.

If differences in the rise starting points indeed have the functional load, it is tempting to argue that the difference observed in young NZE speakers is a difference developing to distinguish between question and statement rises. The third study therefore looked at data from mid-aged speakers. Results showed that the female participants used more rises than males in both sentence types, rises were more likely to be found on statements than on questions, and rises were twice as frequent in the speech of younger speakers.

A useful framework for analyzing the NZE rise data is provided by Autosegmental Metrical (AM) phonology. For NZE rises, the anchor points for a phrase accent are the nuclear syllable and a post-nuclear syllable. The distinction between the late and early rises can be described in terms of whether there is a single anchor point or two. With two anchor points, a H- phrase accent is anchored to both the nuclear syllable and the later anchor point, whereas with a single anchor point, it is only anchored to the later point. This results in a convex rising pattern for the double-anchored rise associating with questions, and a concave one for the single-anchored rise associating with statements.