The prosody of questions in natural discourse
Nancy Hedberg, Juan Manuel Sosa · 2002
For this paper, we examined a corpus of 73 wh-questions and yes/no questions, both positive and negative, from natural discourse.We found that the locus of interrogation (the initial auxiliary in yes/no questions or the initial wh-word in whquestions) most frequently gets an L+H* pitch accent, especially in wh-questions and negative yes/no questions.Positive yes/no questions are more variable, and included 40% unstressed auxiliaries.Nuclear stress was primarily falling in wh-questions, as expected; but positive yes/no questions were almost twice as often falling or level as rising, contrary to expectation.Finally, the topic of the question turned out to be marked primarily with some version of an H* accent rather than an L+H* accent, and the focus with L+H* rather than some variant of H*, contrary to predictions in the literature. CommentA predication, P, is the comment of a sentence, S, iff, in using S the speaker intends P to be assessed relative to the topic of S. FocusThat part of the linguistic expression that realizes the comment.What is interesting about these definitions is that questions and other speech acts as well as statements can be said to have information (topic-focus) structure that doesn't necessarily coincide with any particular syntactic distinction.It is possible that there could be a divergence between the semantic