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The intonation of wh-questions in Franco-Ontarian*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Renée Baligand  and
Eric James
Renée Baligand
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Eric James
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

The melodic structure of an interrogative utterance frequently depends on the grammatical structure of the sentence in question. In addition to the enunciative sentence of the kind vous venez? which bears a particular acoustic mark of interrogation, a rise in fundamental frequency in sentence-final position, there exist also interrogative utterances signalled by inversion of word order and still others marked by lexical means, the WH-questions. It is the intonation of this latter type of sentence which we intend to examine in the Canadian-French spoken in Ontario.

The intonation of interrogative sentences has for some years been the object of important research in different languages. Wells (1945) and Trager and Smith (1951) note in English an intonation curve at the following levels: 2 - 3 - 1 - without any tonal prominence on the interrogative word. Armstrong and Ward (1926), Jones (1932) and Faure (1948) also find that this type of interrogative sentence has a descending intonation. Fries (1964) finds no specific intonation pattern in a spontaneous corpus from which he studied yes-no questions. For German, Von Essen (1956) notes two intonation patterns: one rising (question intonation) and one falling (interrogative intonation).

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Fall 1973 , pp. 89 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1973

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Footnotes

*

This article is an abbreviated version in English of a contribution to appear in French in Grundstrom, A. et Léon, P. (1974).

References

Notes Bibliographiques

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