Past Event

“The prosody of rhetorical questions — evidence from production and perception” Bettina Braun (Konstanz)

This talk presents data on the prosodic realization of rhetorical questions, with a focus on German. Participants produced wh-questions and polar questions in contexts that either favoured an information-seeking or a rhetorical-question reading. The speakers used a range of prosodic cues to signal illocution type (information-seeking or rhetorical). Some cues occur frequently in one of these two illocution types (e.g. a high plateau, H-% in polar rhetorical questions), others are comparatively infrequent, but very specific to one of the two illocution types (e.g. H+!H* in information-seeking wh-questions). Furthermore, other cues are non-tonal (longer duration and more frequent breathy voice quality in rhetorical questions). I then present a classical forced-choice perception experiment, in which we manipulated three of these cues (voice quality, duration, and pitch accent type) and participants indicated whether they thought this signaled an information-seeking or rhetorical question. Results showed clear additive effects of each factor, with responses over 90% correct when all cues converged towards an illocution type. In the final part, I’ll present two larger-scale perception studies, in which we manipulated all possible tonal combinations that the intonational system of German provides (four prenuclear accents, 6 nuclear accents, 4 edge tones), in addition to duration and voice quality, with the aim of developing a prosodic grammar for rhetorical questions.

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