Melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in northern German in spontaneous speech

Abstract

The present paper deals with the description and characterization of the melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in Northern German in spontaneous speech from an intonation and semantic pragmatic point of view. This research has been carried out based on 246 absolute questions from spontaneous speech settings by multiple speakers of different gender, age and education by applying the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) method developed by Cantero (2002). As a result, we found five intonation patterns for absolute questions in German: Falling Final Inflection, Rising Final Inflection, Rising -falling Final Inflection, High nucleus Final Inflection and Rising body and Final Inflection. The first three have been previously defined by researchers using the ToBI method, whilst the fourth and fifth patterns had not, to date, been described in this context. In addition to defining the melodic features of each one in spontaneous speech, we have also contributed to providing the different pragmatic meanings discovered in the various contexts in which each pattern appears.