The Interpretation of Rising Intonation in English

Speaker
Donka Farkas
Affiliation
University of California, Santa Cruz
Date
Wed April 30th 2025, 1:30 - 2:50pm
Location
Margaret Jacks Hall, Greenberg Room (Room 126)

This talk proposes a unified account of rising intonation in regular interrogatives, exemplified in (1), as well as in declaratives pronounced with rising intonation, exemplified in (2):

(1) a.Is Joan home? 
       b. Who is home?

(2) a. Seeing a friend come in with red cheeks: 
             It is cold out there?

       b. Teacher to student who has claimed that 2 + 2 = 5: 
             Two plus two is five?

       c. Walking up to the receptionist in a medical office: 
             My name is Mark Liberman? I have an appointment at 5?

In pursuing a unitary account of these examples, I follow Gunlogson (2001), Rudin (2019), Goodhue (2025) a.o., and depart from Farkas and Roelofsen (2017), in treating the contribution of rising intonation as contextual. Consequently, the semantic content of rising declaratives (RDs) of all stripes is taken to be identical to that of their declarative radical. Building on Goodhue (2025), I propose that the contribution of rising intonation is a post-supposition requiring the utterance to which it attaches to add a non-singleton issue to the discourse Table. In the case of (1), this requirement is met because of the semantics of the uttered sentence. In the examples in (2), the post-supposition is accommodated. The differences between the two questioning RDs in (2a) and (2b), as well as the differences between these two utterance types and the assertive RD;in (2c) are derived from pragmatic considerations concerning the context of utterance, as well as from details pertaining to the connection between the accommodated issue and the semantics of the uttered sentence. The account extends to the less discussed cases of RDs used as rhetorical questions and to express surprise. Finally, I will provide an explanation for the fact that (1)–(2b) are referred to as questions that have been asked, while (2c) is not.

References

Farkas, D. F. and Roelofsen, F. (2017). Division of labor in the interpretation of declaratives and interrogatives. Journal of Semantics, 34(2), 237–289.

Goodhue, D. (2025). Everything that rises must converge. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz//006493.

Gunlogson, C. (2001). True to Form: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English. Ph.D. thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz.

Rudin, D. (2019). Embedded Rising Declaratives and Embedded Quotation. In K. L. Katherine Blake, Forrest Davis and J. Rhyne, editors, Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 29), pages 1–21.

Research Subfield