Question intonation

Encyclopedia of Terminology for CA and IL: Question intonation
Author(s):	Marina N. Cantarutti (University of York, UK) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1688-0896)
To cite:	Cantarutti, Marina N. (2023). Question intonation. In Alexandra Gubina & Chase Wesley Raymond (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Terminology for Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. International Society for Conversation Analysis (ISCA). DOI: []

Question intonation has been used to refer to a speaker’s production of rising intonation that hearably reaches a high point in their vocal range, and which may, in some cases, be associated to the action of eliciting (see discussion below). This label conflates two different aspects: that of representation (the “question mark” symbol in Jeffersonian and GAT-2 conventions), and the actual phonological phenomenon represented, which is normally taken to be a rise-to-high pitch movement towards the end of the unit (also known as a “high rise”).

The following example from the CallFriend corpus (Canavan & Zipperlen 1996) illustrates what “question intonation” as generally defined in the CA/IL literature sounds like, accompanied with a visualization of acoustic information (waveform, spectrogram, and fundamental frequency, or f0, trace). A Jeffersonian and a GAT-2 version of the transcription are offered for comparison.

Jeffersonian

oh re:ally?                                                     

GAT-2 Fine

oh ´REALLy?                                                      

Figure 1: Waveform, spectrogram, and f0 trace of [CallFriend_4708_l59]

The f0 trace shows that a high point at the speaker’s range as well as the highest point in the unit is reached from a previous lower position gliding up from it. The question mark represents this final high pitch level reached, but the rising movement starts at the final accented syllable. These are two related aspects of the realization of the contour in the unit (its direction and initiation, and the final pitch level reached), which are represented independently.

Early CA work (Jefferson 1972) makes reference to “question intonation” without necessarily making a specification as to its form, but the independence between the symbol and an interrogative format has been explicitly stated in CA/IL work. Schegloff (n.d.) explains that the question mark “indicates rising intonation, not necessarily a question”. Hepburn and Bolden (2012) clarify that the mark indexes “strongly rising intonation, but not necessarily an interrogative” (pg. 62). Notwithstanding this, in some work a rise-to-high contour is often associated with an interrogative grammatical format or to the action of questioning, equating the term “question intonation” with “the intonation of questions”.

Walker (2014) warns of the problems of conflating form and function in the understanding of pitch contours, such as when equating a high-rising tone with the action of questioning. In this sense, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) acknowledge that a question “may be constructed with ‘comma’ or ‘period’ intonation, and ‘question’ intonation may occur in association with non-questions” (pg. 732), also discussed in Sacks (1992: vol. 1: 277). Stivers (2010) found also for American English a tendency for yes/no questions to be produced with rising intonation of the “question” or “comma” kind, as well as with falling tones. Couper-Kuhlen (2012) points out there are different contours associated with question formats (which in themselves can take many forms and fulfil different actions) and proves this in a study of different question types in American English (e.g., topic proffers, next-turn repair initiators, etc.) where the final intonation found can be related to syntactic, sequential, action, and stance matters.

Even the generally-assumed relation of the disambiguating power of rising intonation in declarative-formatted actions that do elicitations and requests (e.g., Quirk, et al. 1985, for English) has been challenged. Stivers (2010) found a large number of declarative questions produced with falling tones, but highlights the fact that these were all B-events. Heritage (2012) shows how final-rising declaratives may be understood as informings, and thus, the rising intonation may be understood as “continuing” rather than “questioning”, arguing that it is the relative epistemic status of participants that contributes to action ascription in these cases and not prosody or even syntax. Seuren & Huiskes (2017) analysed yes/no declarative requests in Dutch and found different final intonation patterns. Prior (non-)interactional work has already addressed the one-to-one mapping of rising intonation and questions as “myths” (e.g. Fries 1964; Geluykens 1988; Selting 1992; Walker 2004)

Additional Related Entries:

• Comma intonation
• Period intonation
• Try-marking
• Intonation contour

Cited References:

Canavan, A., & Zipperlen, G. (1996). CALLFRIEND American English-Non-Southern Dialect. Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia, 10(1).

Couper-Kuhlen, E. (1996). Intonation and clause combining in discourse. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 6(3), 389–426.

Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Ono, T. (2010). “Incrementing” in conversation. A comparison of practices in English, German, and Japanese. Pragmatics, 17(4).

Fries, C. C. (1964). On the intonation of 'Yes-No' questions in English. In D. Abercrombie, D. B. Fry, P. A. D. MacCarthy, N. C. Scott, J. L. M. Trim (Eds.), In Honour of Daniel Jones. Longman.

Geluykens, R. (1988). On the myth of rising intonation in polar questions. Journal of Pragmatics, 12(4), 467–485.

Heritage, J. (2012). Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45(1), 1–29.

Hepburn, A., & Bolden, G. B. (2017). Transcribing for Social Research. Sage.

Hepburn, A., & Bolden, G. B. (2012). The Conversation Analytic Approach to Transcription. In J. Sidnell & T. Stivers (Eds.), The Handbook of Conversation Analysis (pp. 57–76). Wiley-Blackwell.

Jefferson, G. (1972). Side sequences. In D. Sudnow (Ed.), Studies in Social Interaction (pp. 294–338). Free Press.

Jefferson, G. (2004). Glossary of transcript symbols with an introduction. In G. Lerner (Ed.), Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation (pp. 13–31). John Benjamins.

Labov, W., & Fanshel, D. (1977). Therapeutic Discourse: Psychotherapy as Conversation. Academic Press.

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman.

Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on Conversation (vols. 1-2). Blackwell.

Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50(4), 696–735.

Schegloff, E. (n.d.). Transcription Module Retrieved July 19, 2021.

Selting, M. (1992). Prosody in conversational questions. Journal of Pragmatics, 17(4), 315–345.

Selting, M., Auer, P., Barth-Weingarten, D., Bergmann, J., Bergmann, P., Birkner, K., Couper-Kuhlen, E., Deppermann, A., Gilles, P., Günthner, S., Hartung, M., Kern, F., Mertzlufft, C., Meyer, C., Morek, M., Oberzaucher, F., Peters, J., Quasthoff, U., Schütte, W., Stukenbrock, A., Uhmann, S. (2011). A system for transcribing talk-in-interaction: GAT 2. Gesprächsforschung: Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion, 12, 1–51

Seuren, L. M., & Huiskes, M. (2017). Confirmation or Elaboration: What Do Yes/No Declaratives Want?. Research on Language & Social Interaction, 50(2), 188–205.

Stivers, T. (2010). An overview of the question–response system in American English conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(10), 2772–2781.

Szczepek Reed, B. (2004). Turn-final intonation in English. In E. Couper-Kuhlen & C. Ford (Eds.), Sound Patterns in Interaction: Cross-linguistic Studies from Conversation. John Benjamins.

ten Have, P. (2007). Doing Conversation Analysis. Sage.

Walker, D. G. (2004). The phonetic design of turn endings, beginnings and continuations in conversation [University of York, UK].

Walker, T. (2014). Form ≠ Function: The Independence of Prosody and Action. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 47(1), 1–16.

Additional References:

Cantarutti, M (2017). Questioning the teaching of ‘question intonation’: the case of classroom elicitations. Proceedings of the Phonetics Teaching and Learning Conference – PTLC 2017 – University College London.

Couper-Kuhlen, E., & Selting, M. (2017). Interactional Linguistics: Studying Language in Social Interaction. Cambridge University Press.

de Ruiter, J. P. (2012). Questions: Formal, Functional and Interactional Perspectives. Cambridge University Press.

Schegloff, E. A. (1984). On some questions and ambiguities in conversation. In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action (pp. 28–52). Cambridge University Press