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Here, as is common with wh-questions, there is a rising intonation on the question word, and a falling intonation at the end of the question. In many descriptions of English, the following intonation patterns are distinguished: Rising Intonation means the pitch of the voice rises over time. Falling Intonation means that the pitch falls with time.
The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as rising inflection, upspeak, uptalk, or high rising intonation (HRI), is a feature of some variants of English where declarative sentences can end with a rising pitch similar to that typically found in yes–no questions.
The following examples are all in response to the stimulus "He saw a crocodile." Polar He saw a crocodile? Variable He saw a what? Alternative He saw a crocodile or an alligator? A polar echo question (also known as a pure echo [2]) repeats some or all of the stimulus, with a rising intonation. It bears some similarity to the rising declarative.
For instance, Westera (2013) argues that rising intonation conveys that the speaker isn't sure whether their utterance is in accordance with Gricean Maxims. On this account, all rising declaratives have the same semantic content but end up with different discourse effects depending on which maxim the speaker worries they are violating.
A rising boundary tone can often be heard internally in a sentence in some languages, for example, to mark a topic, [13] to mark off items in a list, or following the subordinate clause in a sentence such as "If you like it, please buy it". [14]
It applies particularly to yes–no questions; the use of rising question intonation in yes–no questions has been suggested to be one of the universals of human languages. [4] [5] With wh-questions, however, rising intonation is not so commonly used – in English, questions of this type usually do not have such an intonation pattern.
In some languages, such as Italian, intonation is the sole distinction. [citation needed] In some languages, such as English, or Russian, a rising declarative is a sentence which is syntactically declarative but is understood as a question by the use of a rising intonation. For example, "You're not using this?"
Although she started out using intonation randomly, upon acquisition of the term "What's that" she began to use rising intonation exclusively for questions, suggesting knowledge of its contrastive usage. [11] The gesture argument establishes that some children use gesture instead of intonation contrastively. Compare the two examples laid out below: