The intonation of syntactically marked absolute questions in Northern British English in spontaneous speech

Abstract

In this study we analyze the melodic behavior of polar interrogative sentences, from the north of England. The corpus is made up of 70 questions issued by 18 different native informants in real communication situations and extracted from recordings of street interviews published on YouTube and carried out in the cities of York, Manchester, Sheffield and Liverpool. The method used for the analysis is the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) (Cantero, 2002) which allows to quantify, standardize and compare melodic configurations. The results describe four different preliminar intonation patterns of this type of questions. After defining and quantifying each of these patterns, we discuss the results in relation to those descriptions made by other authors in the existing literature.