Journal of Pragmatics 11 (1987) 483494 North-Holland

483

INTONATION AND SPEECH ACT TYPE

An Experimental Approach to Rising Intonation in Queclaratives

Ronald GELUYKENS *

It is hypothesized that the role of rising intonation for the recognition of so-called ‘Queclaratives’ is overrated. Via a perception experiment, it is shown that pragmatic factors, more specifically Searle’s (1969) ‘felicity conditions’, play a decisive role in the recognition of an utterance with declarative form as a question. Provided pragmatic cues are sufficiently strong to determine speech act status, rising intonation is shown to be virtually without impact; if, on the other hand, pragmatic cues do not favor any particular speech act type, intonation may, but need not, act as a cue for determining question-status.

1. Introduction

The present study investigates more closely the relevance of rising intonation contours for the perception of so-called ‘queclaratives’ (Sadock (1974)) in English. Queclaratives are defined here as utterances having the form of a declarative sentence but functioning as requests for information. Previous research (see Geluykens (1985)) has led us to believe that the link between rising intonation and the question-status of an utterance is less systematic than might be expected. In a corpus’ of 60 queclaratives, only 33% were found to have an intonation contour ending with a rise in pitch; the vast majority (63%) ended in a falling pitch. Nevertheless, in quite a number of descriptions of British English intonation - notably Kingdon (1958) and O’Connor and Arnold (1961) - it is claimed that the use of certain rising contours can tranform a declarative sentence into a question. Though most authors admit the possibility of a falling contour on a queclarative (e.g. Halliday (1970: 27)) the implication that rising intonation is more ‘neutral’ is often present.

* Thanks are due to Rent: Collier, David Crystal and an anonymous Journal of Pragmatics referee for comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to Hans ‘t Hart and Jan Roelof De Pijper (IPO, Eindhoven) for their assistance in preparing the data. The test was carried out at Reading University with financial assistance from the British Council.

Author’s address: R. Geluykens, Groeningerstraat 4, 2210 Borsbeek, Belgium, and Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 ITQ, UK. 1 The corpus used was the Survey of English Usage (University College London). We are indebted to its Director, Sidney Greenbaum, for making these data available.

037%2166/87/$3.50 0 1987, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland)

484 R. Geluykens / Rising intonation and gueclaratives

Experimental studies on this issue are few and far between. Bolinger (195 1) reports on the distinction between ‘low rise’, ‘high rise’ and ‘fall plus rise’. Uldall (1962) notes a tendency to interpret utterances with a contour ending high in the range as being questions, but she acknowledges the importance of factors such as voice-quality, tempo, gesture and facial expression. Fourcin (197.5) see also Simon and Fourcin (1976), observes a correlation between rises and questions, at least in short (one-word) utterances. It is stated by Hadding- Koch and Studdert-Kennedy (1964) that “listeners may make use of the entire F” contour” (1964: 181) in deciding on the question-status of an utterance. Schaffer, finally, writing on the role of intonation in the turn taking system, concludes that “there are few consistent relationships holding between the intonation characteristics present in an item and what kind of judgment it receives” (1983: 253). We will argue that the same holds, by and large, for question-recognition.

To our knowledge, no attempt has ever been made to investigate systematic- ally the possible relationship between pragmatic and prosodic factors in the recognition of questions. The present experiment tries to fill that gap. We will start from the following basic hypothesis:

Cues of a pragmatic-contextual nature are the determining factor in recogni- zing an utterance with declarative form as a queclarative; the use of a rising intonation contour does not necessarily turn a declarative utterance into a question.

2. Procedure

2.1. The pragmatic variable

In order to change the pragmatic implications of our test utterances in the simplest possible way, they are devised in such a way that minimal changes in the lexical material have maximal pragmatic effects. As an example, consider the sentence ‘You feel ill’. It is obvious that, whenever it is uttered, it is more likely to be interpreted as a question, provided other factors do not block such an interpretation. We will label this type of utterance ‘question-prone’. The explanation for the question-proneness can be found in the fact that the ‘felicity conditions’ for ‘directives’ (Searle (1969)) are being met. Take for instance Searle’s (1969) Preparatory Rule ‘speaker does not know the answer’; since the verb ‘feel’ refers to the addressee’s mental state, to which the speaker has no direct access, the preparatory rule will not be violated. The same kind of reasoning holds for the other felicity conditions. The utterance is therefore likely to be interpreted as a genuine request for information, despite its declarative form (and, as we will try to show, irrespective of its intonation contour).

R. Geluykens / Rising intonation and queclaratives 485

The utterance ‘I feel ill’, on the other hand, is pragmatically totally different from the first one. Since the verb ‘feel’ in this instance refers to the mental state of the speaker rather than of the addressee, the felicity conditions for directives are not met, as it is very unlikely that someone would request information concerning his/her own mental state. Much more likely, s/he is merely conveying this piece of information to the addressee. This utterance is thus ‘statement-prone’ rather than ‘question-prone’.

Through a simple change in pronoun, it appears from our examples, we can effect large changes in pragmatic implications. We have therefore constructed our test utterances along the same lines, adding utterances of the type ‘He feels ill’ as supposedly ‘neutral’ cases without any special bias towards question- status or statement-status. Of each of the resulting three types, five token utterances were recorded, yielding 15 test utterances in all:*

(1)

(2) (3) (4) (5)

And I’m/you’re/he’s not feeling very wvll (henceforth referred to as 11, Yl and Hl, respectively) I’d/you’d/he’d love to see the girJ (12, Y2, H2) I’m/you’re/he’s going to the &atre tomoxrow (13, Y3, H3) I/you/he like(s) the apples a & (14, Y4, H4) I/you/he do(es) not like Italians (15, Y5, H5)

Note that, in (3) what is involved is not so much a mental state, but a declaration of intention concerning some future action. The same line of reasoning applies here, though: 13 is statement-prone owing to the fact that one does not normally ask questions about one’s own intentions. Y3, on the other hand, is decidedly question-prone.

2.2. The intonational variable3

Five types of intonation contour were superimposed on the test utterances. Use was made of an analysis-resynthesis procedure, in the following manner. First of all, the utterances were recorded, spoken in a monotonous voice and with careful avoidance of any ‘abnormal’ loudness and duration features. The recordings were then analyzed and re-synthesized with elimination of the original F” values; stylized intonation contours were used to replace those. For this purpose, use was made of the model for British English intonation devised by De Pijper (1983); the contours generated by this model have been success- fully tested as regards their ‘naturalness’. Contours used are represented schematically in figure 1.4

* Underscoring: & lines indicate Tonic position; interrupted lines indicate secondary Tonic (the latter is relevant for contour 5 only). 3 The data were prepared at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO), Eindhoven. 4 For more details, cf. De Pijper (1983).

486 R. Geluykens / Rising intonation and queclaratives

Contour 1 is a falling tone, representing Halliday’s (1968,197O) ‘tone 1’. The contour starts in the middle of the pitch range, then rising to high at the start of the pretonic (we will refer to this point, following Crystal (1969), as the ‘Onset’ of the tone unit). The rise is completed at the vowel onset of the Onset syllable. The pitch then stays high in the range, apart from a slight quarter tone dip just before the tonic, and falls to low on the Tonic (i.e. the most prominent syllable); this fall starts 50 msec after the vowel onset of the Tonic syllable. The pitch then stays low until the end of the contour. In the test utterances, pretonics started in the region of 270400 msec after the beginning of the utterance, Tonics occurring at 710 msec for the shortest, 1040 msec for the longest utterance. Total length of the utterances varied from 1660 up to 2020 msec.

Contours 2 and 3 are both rising tones, corresponding to Halliday’s ‘tone 2’ and ‘tone 3’, respectively. In contour 2, immediately after the Onset there is a gradual fall to mid position in the range. 40 msec before the Tonic vowel onset this changes into a steep fall, which ends 40 msec after the Tonic vowel onset. The contour then rises gradually, changing into a steep half rise to high about 80 msec before the end of voicing. Contour 3 differs from contour 2 in two respects. First of all, the pretonic remains high rather than falling gradually; secondly, the first part of the final rise is even less steep.

Contour 4 is a complex tone, more specifically a fall-rise (Halliday’s ‘tone 4’). It starts at mid level; at the Onset, a steep rise to high sets in, followed by a gradual fall to mid extending to the vowel onset of the Tonic. On the Tonic, a steep rise to high takes place, followed by a fall starting about 80 msec after the Tonic vowel onset. The pitch then stays low until the steep final rise occurring on the final syllable.

Contour 5, finally, is a compound tone, viz. a fall followed by a rise (‘tone 13’). It is simply a combination of contour 1 and the final part of contour 3.

These 5 countours were combined with the 15 utterances (l)-(5), yielding 75 test utterances in all, 60 with a rising contour, 15 with a falling one. Contours used are represented graphically in figure 1 (see p. 487).

3. The experiment

Fifteen subjects were asked to participate in the experiment, all of them native speakers’of British (more specifically, ‘English’) English, with one Australian exception. Eight subjects were female, seven were male; most of them had no previous knowledge about intonation. Utterances were recorded in random order, and each utterance was recorded two times, to ensure good comprehen- sion. There were 2 second intervals between each utterance; subjects were

R. Geluykens / Rising intonation and gueclaratives 487

Cl

c2

c3

c4

CS

onset tonic

Fig. 1. Stylized intonation contours.

asked not to rewind the tape. The actual utterances were preceded by the following instructions: “Suppose the person on the tape is talking to you; you have to decide whether he [the original voice was a male one] has asked you something, or simply told you something; in other words: whether he has uttered a statement or a question (. . .)“.

Subjects were asked to make judgments concerning the question-status of the test utterances, on a four-point scale. The four categories were: ‘definite question” (represented as Q’ in table 1); ‘more question than statement’ (Q”);

488 R. Geluykens / Rising intonation and queclaratives

‘more statement than question’ (~3”); ‘definite statement’ (S’). No ‘neutral’ category was included, which forced the listeners to decide one way or the other, either opting for question-status (Q’ and Q”) or for statement-status (S’ and S”). In addition, subjects were asked to mark a sentence as ‘odd’ if it sounded unnatural to them in some way; this, however, did not excuse them from having to decide on its question-status. Since utterances I-Y5H5 received a markedly high number of ‘odd’ judgments, they were excluded from our results; the discussion, therefore, is based on 60 utterances rather than on the original 75.

None of the subjects had any difficulties with the test. Some of them complained about the lack of time afforded to respond to each individual utterance, but this was consciously built into the experiment, so as to obtain spontaneous reactions. Results are represented in tables 1 and 2, and figure 2 (table 2 conflates the four original categories into two, viz. ‘question’ and ‘statement’). The proportion of question-responses for each category of utterances (‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘he’, respectively) is shown in figure 2 (see p. 490).

Table 1 Division of responses on four-point scale.

Q Q” s” s 11-U with:

Cl c2 c3 c4 C5

Total Cl-C5

Yl-Y5 with: Cl c2 c3 c4 c5

Total Cl-C5

HlLH5 with: Cl c2 c3 c4 c5

Total Cl-C5

0 (0%) 0 (0%) 6 (10%) 0 (0%) 10 (17%) 19 (32%) 2 (3%) 9 (15%) 24 (40%) 1 (2%) 6 (10%) 17 (28%) 2 (3%) 1(12%) 19 (32%)

5 (2%) 32 (12%) 85 (28%)

4 (7%) 26 (43%) 11 (18%) 13 (22%) 26 (43%) 10 (17%) 13 (22%) 19 (32%) 22 (36%) 4 (7%) 26 (43%) 20 (33%) 6 (10%) 22 (36%) 18 (30%)

40 (13%) 119 (40%) 81 (27%)

0 (0%) 1 (2%) 14 (24%) 2 (3%) 18 (30%) 25 (42%) 2 (3%) 12 (20%) 22 (36%) 0 (0%) 12 (20%) 20 (33%) 0 (0%) 10 (17%) 26 (43%)

4 (1%) 53 (18%) 107 (36%)

54 (90%) 31 (51%) 25 (42%) 36 (60%) 32 (53%)

178 (58%)

19 (32%) 11 (18%) 6 (10%)

10 (17%) 14 (24%)

60 (20%)

45 (75%) 15 (25%) 24 (40%) 28 (47%) 24 (40%)

136 (45%)

R. Geluykens / Rising intonation and queclaratives 489

Table 2 Division of responses on two-point scale.

Question Statement

II-15 with: Cl c2 c3 c4 c5

Total Cl-C5

Y l-Y5 with: Cl c2 c3 c4 c5

Total Cl-C5

HlLH5 with: Cl c2 c3 c4 c5

Total Cl-C5

0 (0%) 60 (100%) 10 (17%) 50 (83%) 11 (18%) 49 (82%) 7 (12%) 53 (88%) 9 (15%) 51 (85%)

37 (12%) 263 (88%)

30 (50%) 30 (50%) 39 (65%) 21 (35%) 32 (53%) 28 (47%) 30 (50%) 30 (50%) 28 (47%) 32 (53%)

159 (53%) 141 (47%)

1 (2%) 59 (98%) 20 (33%) 40 (67%) 14 (23%) 46 (77%) 12 (20%) 48 (80%) 10 (17%) 50 (83%)

57 (19%) 243 (8 1%)

4. Results 5

Our results show that the pragmatic variable contributes significantly to the perception of two different speech act types: 53% of the Y-utterances are perceived as being questions, whereas the same holds for a mere 12% of the I- utterances. The H-category differs significantly from both the I- and the Y-category.

In the Y-utterances, there are no significant differences whatsoever between falling contour Cl and the total of the other, rising contours C2 to C5, neither on a two-point nor on a four-point scale. The same holds for Cl compared to every individual rising contour (Cl vs. C2, Cl vs. C3, etc.). Likewise, there are no significant differences within the group of rising contours (C2 vs. C3, C2 vs.

’ Statistical tests carried out on the material are the following: X2-tests to calculate significance levels on the 2-point scale; Kolmogorov-Smirnov (2.tailed) tests for the 4-point scale (for more details on tests, cf. Siegel (1956)). The significance level is set at 0.001 throughout.

490 R. Geluykens / Rising intonation and queclaratives

90

70

50

30

10

c

1 2 3 4 5 contour

Fig. 2. % of question-responses per utterance-type and per contour (see also table 2).

C4, etc.). All this supports strongly our hypothesis that the contour used is irrelevant for question-recognition.

In the I-utterances, differences between Cl and each individual rising contour are all significant. Among the rising contours, on the other hand, there are no significant differences. Put differently: Rising intonation contributes somewhat to question-recognition, irrespective of the precise form of the rising contour. In absolute terms, however, the number of question-responses is very low, even for rising contours (18% for C3 being the highest ratio).

As for H-utterances, similar observation as for the I-utterances apply: There are significant differences between falling contour Cl and each rising contour. The number of question-responses is always slightly higher than is the case for I-utterances, but not significantly so.

Comparing Q’ and Q” (table 1) yields no significant differences between the ‘definite question’ and the ‘more question than statement’ categories. Put differently: Intonation does not ‘strengthen’ or ‘weaken’ the question-status of an utterance (this holds for I-, Y- and H-utterances alike). The situation is very different for the ‘definite statement’ and ‘more statement than question’ categories (S’ and S” in table 1). Comparing Cl with the rising contours, we

R. Geluykens 1 Rising intonation and queclaratives 491

get significant levels of difference almost throughout (exceptions being Cl vs. C2 and C5 for the Y-category, and Cl vs. C4 for the H-category), whereas there are no significant differences among the rising contours. In other words, rising intonation does influence the statement-status of an utterance, viz. it makes statements less ‘definite’. We will discuss this in more detail in the next section.

5. Discussion

As pointed out in the previous section, the pragmatic variable proves to be very effective, as there is a marked variation in the number of question- responses across the I-, Y- and H-categories (12%, 53% and 19%, respecti- vely). The number of question-responses is surprisingly low, especially for the H-utterances (the supposedly neutral category), considering the number of rising contours used in the experiment. This offers indirect support to our hypothesis: If rising intonation were really that important for questioning, one might have expected a higher frequency of question-responses for H-utter- ances. As it is, there is a high frequency of statement-responses throughout, even for the Y-category (47%), which turns out to be not quite as question- prone as expected. It seems highly likely, therefore, that a number of other factors contribute to an utterance having question-status in actual discourse. Facial expression and gestures are obvious candidates; the preceding linguistic context is bound to be important; other prosodic factors, such as pitch range, pauses, loudness and tempo might be relevant.

As for our hypothesis, Y-utterances are the most important test-case, since here the pragmatic variable contributes to their question-status. Results are very striking: The intonation contour appears to be of no importance for recognizing these utterances as questions. In other words, the claim made in the literature that rising intonation is a deciding factor for the recognition of queclaratives lacks any empirical support. The scepticism shown by Crystal (1969) and Ladd (1980), among others, concerning the role of intonation is therefore fully justified. In I- and H-utterances, rising intonation does seem to have some effect, as shown by the increase in question-responses. However, two observations have to be made. First, even with rising contours, there is a marked tendency to interpret the utterances as statements rather than questions (the maximum proportion of question-responses being 33% for H-utterances with C2); this suggests that, even here, pragmatic factors are more important than intonational factors. Secondly, the test exploits only one pragmatic factor; in actual conversation, where there are several pragmatic cues, intonation might be even less important.

Our general conclusion concerning the role of rising intonation in queclara- tives may be summed up as follows:

492 R. Geluykens / Rising intonation and queclaratives

Rising intonation is irrelevant for the recognition of a declarative utterance as a queclarative, provided pragmatic factors contribute to the utterance’s ques- tion-status. If pragmatic cues fail to make the utterance question-prone, rising intonation may, but need not, be used to turn such an utterance into a queclarative.

The kind of rising contour used appears not to make much difference as regards the question-status of an utterance, even for the cases where rises do score some effect (viz. I- and H-utterances). By and large, there are no significant differences between C2 (rise), C3 (rise), C4 (fall-rise) and C5 (fall plus rise). This seems to suggest that it is not the entire contour which is relevant, but only the final rise; this argues against a ‘holistic’ approach to intonation, with separate ‘meanings’ attached to each contour as a whole (cf. Liberman and Sag (1974) for a holistic view); on the contrary, it lends support to Bolinger’s (1982) case for a decomposition of contours into smaller, independent ‘meaningful elements’.

Within the statement-responses, we have noticed a difference in S’ and S” responses as a function of the contour used. For all the utterances, in all three categories (I-, Y- and H-), statements with a rising contour are interpreted as being ‘less definite’ statements than those with a falling contour. Once more, the kind of rising contour is irrelevant. Since the utterances are clearly not interpreted as queclaratives, we must conclude that the statement-force is simply weakened to some extent by the final rise, resulting in ‘tentative statements’. This seems to be a consistent feature of rising intonation throughout our test, and is obviously related to the ‘openness’ or ‘non-finality’ meaning of Rises referred to in the literature (see, for instance, Cruttenden (198 1)). Our data, however, are too limited to draw any firm conclusions about the ‘meaning’ of rising intonation.

Our experiment is limited in other respects as well. For one thing, we have not taken into account the possible attitudinal implications of the intonation contours (see Cutler (1977) for further discussion). Furthermore, we have not touched on the possible role of intonation in distinguishing genuine questions from ‘Indirect Speech Acts’ (Searle (1975)) such as requests. This area is clearly under-investigated (but see the work carried out by Sag and Liberman (1975)). Consider the following conversational exchanges:

(6) A: Is everything all right, sir? B: Could you pass me the salt?

(7) A: Is everything all right, sir? B: I could do with some salt, please.

(8) A: I think I’ll take an aspirin. B: You’re not feeling very well?

R. Geluykens / Rising intonation and queclaratives 493

It is clear that the replies in (6) and (7) are similar speech acts (viz. requests), despite their formal differences; the replies in (7) and (8), on the other hand, are probably different speech acts, depite their shared declarative form.

Our experiment leads to questions concerning the role of intonation in other languages. Similar claims about queclaratives as those for English are some- times made (French is a case in point). Comparative studies are, however, very scarce, a notable exception being Bolinger (1978) who pleads for “fuller descriptions of how and when particular intonations of yes-no questions are used” (1978: 503) [Bolinger includes queclaratives in his category ‘yes-no question’]. We might add that there is also a need for fuller descriptions of the pragmatic environment in which intonation patterns are used.

6. Conclusion

It has been shown that, at least for the rising contours tested here, the role of rising intonation in queclaratives is overestimated. Rising intonation does not contribute significantly to the recognition of queclaratives; it is not able to overrule the pragmatic cues present in an utterance. It can, however, contribute towards question-recognition if pragmatic cues are insufficient for a straight- forward interpretation. When strong pragmatic factors are present to favor either the question-status of an utterance or its statement-status, the most rising inonation can do is to weaken the statement-force to some extent.

Clearly, more research along the same lines is in order to evaluate the role of prosody in questioning. For instance, pitch range has not been varied in this experiment; all contours rise from the baseline to the upper limit of the pitch range. With this in mind, it might be worthwhile to investigate contours which start higher than the baseline. On the pragmatic side, attitudinal factors suggest themselves as worthy of more research. However, on the basis of the present experiment, it would not be realistic to expect simple correlations between prosodic form and pragmatic function.

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