Re: Pitch and tense)

>On Sat, 26 Jun 1999 09:10:16 -0700 Matt Pearson <mpearson@...>
>writes:
>>Raising the voice at the end of statements is common among teenagers
>>all over the US and Canada, and seems to have a very specific
>>discourse
>>function - namely to signal something like "it's still my turn to
>>speak,
>>I'm just pausing for a second".  I think this is a relatively recent
>>innovation in American English, and I'd be very interested to know
>>where it comes from.
>I always thought of raising my voice at the end of statements as the same
>thing as "like" and "right?" - a way to make it less sure of a statement,
>less empirically objectively "true".  A bit like languages which mark
>things like hearsay, observation, etc.
Hmm.  I've been making an informal study of the final raising phenomenon
(as evidenced at UCLA, anyway), and it seems to me to have more to do
with discourse continuity than with an unwillingness to commit to the
truth of what the speaker is saying.  When my students were giving their
end-of-term presentations a couple weeks ago, I noticed one of my students
doing final raising.  It seems to me that she would raise the pitch at
the end if a sentence if and only if it was going to be followed by another
sentence which elaborated on the same topic.  Lowering the pitch at the
end of the sentence seemed to mark a "paragraph break" for her.

I wonder if final raising isn't an extension of what is sometimes called
"list intonation":  When presenting a long list of items, I've noticed,
speakers tend to have rising pitch on each of the items in the list
except the last one.  So in the sentence:

        "Let's see, when I go to the store I have to get milk,
        juice, apples, bread, and sandwich spread."

you'll get a sharp rising intonation on "milk", "juice", "apples", and
"bread", and a falling intonation on "sandwich spread".  Here again,
rising pitch seems to indicate "there's more to come", while falling
pitch indicates "I'm finished now".

Matt.

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Matt Pearson
mpearson@ucla.edu
UCLA Linguistics Department
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
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